Paper Crane Tales
by TeaForRevenge
Summary: Hikaru and Kaoru play a game. But how is Haruhi supposed to join when even the twins themselves don't know the rules?
1. Chapter 1 Choice of Paper

Disclaimer: Ouran is not mine.

Summary: Hikaru and Kaoru play a game. But how is a certain commoner supposed to join when even the twins themselves don't know the rules?

Author's note: My first non-oneshot. Tremble in awe before my… er… non-oneshotness.

Uh… Yeah. Anyway, if you have any questions about the story, feel free to ask and I'll try to answer as soon as I can.

**Chapter One**

There had been a beginning.

Kaoru knew there had been.

He just couldn't say when.

Perhaps, he thought, it happened like this.

A six year old Hikaru took his twin's hand into his own.

"We don't want a second one," they declared in unison, their joined hands swinging back and forth.

Their mother took a look at the matching pouts on their tiny faces and tried a different approach.

"Look, loves, this way each of you would get to be the friend of a very lonely teddy bear," she said and presented them the stuffed animals, one pink, one blue.

Her sons looked at each other out of the corner of their eyes.

"No. We just want one," they stated finally, their pouts only deepening, "And he can be _our_ friend."

Not quite ready to give up yet, their mother turned to the twin on the right. "Hikaru, honey, see-"

"He isn't Hikaru," the left twin piped up, "I am."

"Sorry," their mother said without missing a beat, "It's just that you look so much alike."

As one, the twins took a step closer to each other.

"How do you expect it to work with just one teddy bear, anyway?" their mother continued.

Two identical faces turned to stare up at her.

She couldn't decide if it was deeply amazing or slightly creepy to observe the way a grin grew completely in synch on their lips.

"We can share."

Their mother didn't even sigh in response, she just put both bears on their bedside tables and left.

As she did so, the right twin turned to the other.

"Do you think she knew she guessed right, Kaoru?"

The other twin tilted his head to the side. "Mother never does."

A small tremble went through their joined hands.

The next day, Mrs. Hitachiin wasn't all that surprised to find her working desk at home had become the quite gruesome murder scene of a single pink teddy bear.

Then again, maybe it all started completely different, more like this.

Fingers glided across white, folding, turning, unfolding, folding again.

Breath was exhaled.

The Host Club stared at what was once a completely normal piece of paper resting in the palm of Haruhi's hand.

Hunny was the first to step forward (skipping, really), his face lit up in a way usually reserved for especially tasty sweet treats.

"Haru-chan!" he exclaimed, taking her hand in his almost as if to make sure it was real. "It's-"

"A paper crane," Haruhi replied evenly and blinked up at the stoic presence of Mori suddenly at her side. "I don't get what's so special about that."

"I don't either," Hikaru remarked at the same as his twin yawned pointedly wide and long.

"But!" Tamaki exclaimed, his face lit up in a way that made him seem years younger, "Can't you see the beautiful gracefulness in its simplicity sure to satisfy our costumers' unfailing sense for aesthetics?!"

There were one or two beats of silence.

Then, one of the twins gave the paper bird a flick of his fingers.

It sailed out of Haruhi's palm, was airborne for one wobbling twirl and, quite ungracefully, plunked down to the ground.

Tamaki shrieked.

"…it's a piece of paper, tono," Hikaru said after the crash landing. "So what if it's folded to look like an aerodynamically-challenged bird-thing? It's still just paper."

Tamaki shrieked some more.

Some feet away from the rest of the group, where he had been preoccupied with checking the latest Host Club sale rates on his notebook up to now, Kyouya felt declined to translate.

"What our…king is trying to express so eloquently," he stated over Tamaki's volume of voice, "...is that he made Haruhi show us this because he wishes for us to partake in more… commoners' activities."

"Yes!" Tamaki cried and calmed down somewhat, "Finally someone who grasps my true genius!"

Kyouya slammed his laptop shut. "You told me about it. Three times. Every hour we've been in school. For a week."

The light gleamed off Kyouya's glasses. "Be assured I will find a way to… repay your kindness."

"Er…" Tamaki suppressed a twitch and instead twisted rather quickly to several towers of paper on a table beside him, glue and pairs of scissors perched precariously perched atop.

"Look my children what I got you!"

"Oh yeah, look everybody," Hikaru intoned, "It's paper!"

Tamaki went into shrieking mode once again.

All the better to enjoy the show with, Hikaru took Kaoru's hand into his own.

The problem with that was where his twin's hand should have been there was only air.

Worse, said twin's hand was closing around a crash-landed 'just a piece of paper' lying on the floor.

Kaoru's attention, though, was resting on something completely different.

Hikaru looked at Kaoru looking at Haruhi.

The muscles in his arms clenched.

"Careful," Haruhi was instructing an overly excited Hunny in the folding of yet another paper crane, "If you tug too hard at one end everything becomes apart."

Hunny's eyes widened and he held up a decidedly sickly looking paper-bird…thing. "I got it, Taka-chan, see, I got it right!"

Mori eyed the wilted crane and the corners of his mouth lifted upwards.

Still as excited, Hunny turned around to Haruhi.

In one motion, he tugged at her tie until she was on his level and brushed his lips across her left cheek.

"Thank you," Hunny told her, nothing childish in his tone of voice, before he bounced, quite childishly, in direction of the cakes they had left from a day of hosting, Mori in his tow.

Kyouya took note.

Tamaki was still far too deep into his shrieking fit to notice.

Haruhi simply blinked, once, twice, and shrugged.

All of a sudden, completely unexpectedly to Hikaru, Kaoru smiled softly at the paper bird now clutched in his hands.

Hikaru glared.

Apparently, even Tamaki had his ranting limits, because at that moment, there was a cough and a voice, just a bit on the scratchy side, followed.

"Anyway," the Suou heir said, "It's going to be so much fun folding all of it!"

Everyone turned to stare at the large, wobbling piles of paper, glue and scissors surrounding Tamaki.

The next moment, Haruhi slung her schoolbag across her shoulders and with a calmly stated "I am going home.", she went to leave.

"My precious daughter!" Tamaki exclaimed and sprung after her.

In his haste, he also bumped into the table next to him.

So, when Haruhi spun around to tell him off, she didn't even have enough time to realize that, amid all the paper and glue raining down on her, there was a pair of scissors crashing down right at her face.

Her world turned red.

If it didn't begin like that, it could have been this way.

The door to the twin's bedroom was thrown open and in followed their mother, a lot of a pink something in her fingers.

The twins didn't look up from their video game, a single blue teddy bear perched in-between them.

"Do you have an explanation for this?" their mother asked and dropped a heap of pink stuffed teddy innards in front of her sons.

"We didn't do a thing," they chirped in chorus, their concentration still on the game before them.

Their mother glanced at the bed on the left, at a gleaming pair of scissors they hadn't even bothered to hide.

The only sound to fill the room was the click-clack-clack of her sons pushing the buttons of their gamepads.

Their mother waited.

She waited for three full sequences of click-clack-clack

At some point, along with another click-clack-clack, there could be heard the closing sound of a door.

Without taking his eyes off the screen, one twin asked the other "Have we got any continues left?"

Click-clack-clack.

"There are always continues left," responded his twin.

Click-clack-clack.

They continued to play.

_Click-clack-clack._

On the other hand, it could also have been that way.

"You really need to stop doing this before you make a habit out of it," Haruhi remarked while she dabbed Kaoru's wound with antiseptics.

(Kyouya had produced them from a first-aid kit he had apparently purchased the moment the word 'scissors' had left Tamaki's mouth for the first time.)

Kaoru winced at the differing sensations of the sting of antiseptics and the warmth of Haruhi's touch on the injury on his hand. "Can't do. We got no guarantee license for our toy. If you break, we will be left without replacement."

"He wouldn't have had to anything if a certain idiot hadn't decided to play make pretend with a frigging pair of scissors!" Hikaru objected heatedly and narrowed his eyes at a mess on the floor, "Isn't that right, tono?"

Aforementioned mess of blond hair and teary eyes raised his head from the floor long enough to give a wavering wail of: "I am sorry, really, I am!"

(In the background, Hunny let his newly-folded paper crane whirl through the air, Kyouya thought up seven different ways they could make profit out of Kaoru's injury and Mori alternated between glancing at his cousin and the only girl of the Host Club.)

Hikaru tapped Tamaki into his side with one of his shoes, none too gently. "Sorry doesn't cut it!"

Messed up hair and tears were reinforced. "I didn't mean to!" Tamaki sniffled.

"It's fine, tono," Kaoru declared loudly and gave his brother a small shake of his head.

In turn, Hikaru crossed his arms before his chest and gave a not so small huff. Not for a second he took his eyes off his twin.

"Really?" a mess on the floor inquired.

"I'm really okay," Kaoru told him and locked eyes with his brother.

Another huff made itself heard.

Apparently, that was all it took to make Tamaki less of a mess and more of… well himself, because, just a second afterwards, he demanded of Kyouya to supply them with safety scissors.

With a roll of her eyes at Tamaki's antics, Haruhi applied a band-aid to the scratch on Kaoru's left hand.

Afterwards, she paused for a moment, only to bend forward, without haste, and breathe a whispered "Thanks" into his ears.

Kaoru closed his eyes, just minutely, and leaned into her, ever so slightly.

As Hikaru had never taken his eyes off his twin, he saw.

It also might have happened in such a manner.

A sigh.

A toss.

A turn.

Shifting.

A sigh.

A toss.

A turn.

Shifting.

Repeat.

Kaoru stared at the ceiling of their room with bleary eyes.

Lying in his bed, he was forced to endure a night audition of his twin's irrational behaviour at its best.

"Hikaru?" he said after several encore performances, "I can't sleep when you can't sleep."

The shifting didn't stop. "Sh. I'm thinking."

Kaoru rolled his head into his brother's direction. "Does your thinking include sighing and shifting every other second?"

This time there was a pause and even though it was dark, Kaoru knew Hikaru had turned to face him too.

"It's complicated sighing and shifting stuff."

Kaoru could just imagine the frown etched unto Hikaru's face.

With deliberate slowness he put the hand Haruhi had treated on his twin's shoulder.

"I'm fine, Hikaru. It's just a scratch."

The skin under Kaoru's fingers trembled.

"It's not that," Hikaru whispered, "It's…"

Another sigh, one more shift, both not by Hikaru and there was considerable less distance between them.

Kaoru entwined his and his twin's fingers.

"…it's complicated." Hikaru's breath flittered across his collarbone. "Just complicated."

An exhaling of breath, just one more, and Kaoru whispered: "Okay.

Hikaru entwined their fingers further.

That night, there was no more sighing and shifting.

Perhaps it was probable that it had begun like this too.

Two pairs of arms sneaked across a single waist.

Pages of a book were turned.

Grinning faces were buried in short hair.

Irritation was made know.

"Don't you have to do your homework as well?" Haruhi asked the twins, a book in her lap and a tangle of limbs thrown across her body.

"Aw…" Kaoru drawled into her ear, letting his breath fawn across her skin, "Look, our faithful toy is concerned for us!"

Haruhi took up her book once more before glaring at them over the rim of its pages.

Hikaru shook his head overdramatically. "Somehow I'm not feeling the faith."

Kaoru tried to appear thoughtful for a moment there, yet couldn't quite keep the grin off his lips. "Why, then we'll just have to test her belief."

With a shake of her head, Haruhi went back to reading.

"See that?" Hikaru remarked to his brother, giving Haruhi's waist a squeeze, "Yes, a test of belief is most definitely in order."

With that, an unsuspecting Haruhi, book and all, was lifted into one of the twin's laps, her legs positioned to stretch across the other's knees.

Haruhi turned a page of her book.

"Now, our surely faithful toy, you can either-"Hikaru began while Kaoru raised, beyond Haruhi's back, one finger into the air, two fingers, three-

"What is the meaning of this?" Tamaki's shrill voice rang out, right on cue.

Nonchalantly, Hikaru faced Tamaki. "Why, tono, what a surprise to meet you here in our… clubroom."

Kaoru stifled a chortle of laughter in Haruhi's hair.

Said commoner was by now halfway through her history assignment.

"We are kind of busy here. Testing faith and all," Hikaru carried on conversationally, "Was there a reason for this interruption?"

Tamaki bristled. "I want you to stop injuring my precious daughter's fragile purity! Let go of her, you treacherous imps!"

"Funny he would mention 'injury' don't you think?" Hikaru asked his brother, his fingers starting to play with a few strands of brown hair.

Kaoru seemed to mull over his brother's words. (Anyone knew you could do so best while nuzzling your favorite commoner's neck.)

Haruhi started to memorize some particular important facts.

Suddenly, Kaoru snapped his fingers and waved his left hand around the air, a band-aid well visibly against his white skin.

Tamaki paled, stuttered and the cry of 'mother' was on the tip of his tongue.

Then, he remembered that the other three hosts (Hunny, Mori, Kyouya) had gone to inspect the authenticity of the weapons for their latest cosplay performance. (The last they would all be able to attend with their oldest members' impending graduation looming over their head.)

Also, they were doing so on his own orders.

Tamaki gulped.

The twins touched.

Haruhi pondered if she should prepare the next few pages in advance for next lesson.

After a bit more gulping Tamaki gasped out a shaky "Fine!" and proceeded to recede into his personal corner of woe and misery.

Beyond Haruhi's back, the twins gave each other high-five.

There was the sound of a book snapping shut.

"He's right, you know," Haruhi announced as she put her book into her schoolbag and started to sort out which limbs were hers, "You've to let me go. I've to get my train."

"Definitely not feeling the faith," Hikaru muttered and the grin on Kaoru's face had waned slightly.

Both could tell offering Haruhi a home ride in their limo would be like asking a wall to paint itself.

For that reason, they didn't stop her from detangling herself.

Neither of them could tell however, which twins' hands lingered the longest on the girl.

In the end, it was possible it had been as simple as this.

The gong rang.

"Aren't you coming, Kaoru?" Haruhi asked over her shoulder.

At her side stood Hikaru, giving his twin a lopsided grin.

"Yes," Kaoru said and closed up to them.

They made their way back to class, Hikaru on the left, Haruhi in the middle, Kaoru on the right, together.

It was most likely, though, that it hadn't happened at all yet, because it was just about to start.

It was the day of Mori's and Hunny's graduation and the Host Club (namely Tamaki) had insisted on organizing a party for them.

There was cake, lots of cake, drinks and music, in combination with a hoard of squealing girls.

Yet, for once, Mori and more so Hunny completely disregarded all the various sweet treats displayed or any attempt to get them to dance.

Nevertheless, it didn't stop the girls in their squealing, for there was a person Hunny and Mori danced with tonight.

Haruhi.

Dressed in a suite similar to theirs, she gave Mori permission to lead her through the more complicated steps or whirled around the floor with a beaming Hunny.

Time after time after time, until Haruhi got dizzy and had to sit down, both Hosts hovering at her sides, awaiting the moment the girl felt well enough to be swept to the dance floor once more.

The other club members let them. It was an unspoken agreement between the six of them.

All knew it was probably going to be some time before either Mori or Hunny were going see Haruhi (or any of them) again, least dance with her.

So, they contented themselves with watching from the sidelines and occasionally indulging a girl's wish for a dance.

That was the way Hikaru found his brother.

Watching from the sidelines, in a secluded corner away from the heaviest throb of people.

He stood next to his twin.

Kaoru didn't react but continued watching.

Hikaru didn't have to look to know who Kaoru was looking at.

"So, you have a crush on her, too," Hikaru state d with all the non-existent tact he had.

Kaoru didn't react to this either, at least not until he did by whispering a simple: "Yes."

Hikaru snorted, his eyes following the twirling forms of Haruhi and Hunny on the dance floor.

"We're both screwed."

Kaoru responded with a short chuckle. "Yep. Totally."

A not quite seventeen year old Hikaru took his twin's hand into his own.

"What do we do, Kaoru?"

His brother blinked and stared at their entwined hands.

Slowly, a grin started to spread across his lips. "We don't do a thing." 

Hikaru's lips got infected by the grin. "Do we have any continues?"

"There are always continues," Kaoru firmly stated and took a step closer to his brother, "When do we start playing?"

Hikaru tapped his chin as if considering a matter of grave importance.

"How about… now?" he asked and before Kaoru could stop his twin, Hikaru stalked across the room with a shout of "Hey, Haruhi!".

As Kaoru watched a person looking so alike to him walk up to a person so unlike both of them, he discovered both were equally important to him in different ways.

Suddenly, he found it didn't really matter when it had all started.

Kaoru was much more worried about how it was going to end.


	2. Two Coloured

Disclaimer: Ouran is not mine.

Author's note: Oh, I'm just too tired right now. Please imagine something witty of your choice right here. Thanks.

Chapter 2

The twins played a game.

They played and played and played all throughout the school year.

The difficulty was getting Haruhi to join.

Often, they would just resort to dragging her right into the game, to the point that wherever brown eyes, blank expression, and blunt remarks went, amber eyes, sly innuendos and a lot of touch followed.

So, they played, day after day.

Until, one particular day, amber eyes had to face a final boss with light-brown eyes, lips made for pouting and short arms around the waist of brown eyes and blank expression.

"Oh," Haruhi said as she entered music room number three, her gaze wandering between some brochures in her hands, the wrist-watch at her right arm and the boy draped around her.

"For a moment there, Hunny-sempai, I thought you were one of the twins."

She could feel the arms around her tense, ever so slightly.

"Haru-chan," the boy released her name in a breathy whisper, drowned out by the volume of his next words, "Haru-chan, I grew, see, see?"

Haruhi took a step backwards, out of his embrace, to regard the boy before her.

When she found his eyes to be level with hers, the corners of her mouth tugged up. "Yes, you-"

"-are late," two voices identical in pitch threw in, their comment not directed at Hunny at all.

Checking her wrist watch, Haruhi's face drew a blank.

"I was at a postgraduate study information lecture," she held up the brochures, "A lecture which you should have attended as well. It's important for your future."

Hikaru took a step closer to her left side as Kaoru did at the right, so that the only obstacle in their way to free Haruhi-access was a boy with lips made for pouting.

(Which were, right then, indeed pouting.)

"We're going to inherit the company anyway," both twins leaned into her face, "Why should we-"

They paused, exchanged a glance over Hunny's head.

Haruhi knew what was about to happen the moment dual grins of impending commoner abuse spread across their lips.

Hikaru turned to Hunny while he slung an arm around Haruhi.

"We know you can't visit often, what with all that dojo and studying business going on," with a jerk, he pulled Haruhi to his chest, "But this is important school… stuff."

"Yeah," Kaoru added in a theatrical sigh, "Important for our futures and more… stuff."

With that, the twins hoisted each half a sighing Haruhi over their shoulders and carried her to a more secluded part of the room.

Watching Haruhi 'depart' with a weak wave at him, Hunny unclenched his fists only when a heavy pair of arms settled on his shoulders.

"Ah," Mori commented, his gaze on two boys and a girl, and gave his cousin a slight squeeze.

"Yes," Kyouya's voice rang out from somewhere to Hunny's left.

(In the meantime, Tamaki gave chase after his daughter to 'preserve her undiluted pureness of mind from dual defiling by wicked doppelgangers'.)

"Lately, the twins seem to demand an… inappropriate amount of attention."

Hunny laid a hand atop Mori's.

"We should visit more often," was all he said and, his line of vision full of red mingling with brown, Hunny began to suspect.

Other days, the twins got bored and attempted a different level of difficulty.

Kaoru put his hands into his pockets and examined Tamaki's newest cosplay suggestion.

(Impressively presented by Tamaki hopping around in a furry, pink bunny costume.)

"That's..."

"…stupid," Hikaru finished for his brother as Tamaki made an extremely elaborate twirl, his long stuffed ears flopping up and down

Kyouya levelled a look at them, pen poised on a blank page of his notebook.

This made both twins take a step closer to their handy commoner-sized shadow king protection shield.

Yet, instead of telling them off, Kyouya did something unexpected.

He coughed, a low, rumbling sound.

The twins sensed a weakness.

Naturally, being the good little boys they were not, they chose to exploit it.

It took a quite suicidal bravado, the ability of selected obliviousness to death glares sent their way and four exactly carried out motions.

Then, Hikaru and Kaoru were dancing around a still coughing Kyouya, his glasses crooked, the knot of his tie loose, and, most importantly, his notebook in the twins' captivity.

"Dear notebook-diary thingie," Hikaru sing-songed, the aforementioned book pressed to his chest and fluttered his eyelashes for emphasis.

Kaoru snickered so hard he almost forgot to keep in motion, what with being on the run from certain death and all.

"Once again, these devilishly handsome twins have outwitted me with their sheer brilliance," Hikaru continued and presented the book to his twin with a flourish.

Kaoru held their stolen treasure high up in front of him, as if auditioning for a stage play, his eyes closed.

"Alas, woe is me! How am I ever supposed to plot against someone so much more attractive than me?"

Amid a blurry of red hair, amber eyes and alike faces, Kyouya just went very, very still.

Despite the tangible feeling of a disaster about to strike in the air (Or more so in Kyouya's grip on his cell phone, one speed-dial away from his body-guards), the twins would have gone into their self-imposed doom snickering, if not for a pair of slender hands taking the notebook from Kaoru.

"Stop it," Haruhi told them and handed the book back to its owner, "Why don't you go and talk to Tamaki-sempai about the costumes."

(About Tamaki right at that point; his vision impaired and his hearing muted by the furry mask of his costume, he bravely kept on hopping around in the background, still trying to make everyone see the greatness of his latest idea.)

"And no, you can't 'accidentally' take me along with you," Haruhi stated.

Both twins heard the no-nonsense tone of her voice; saw the way her face lost its softness around the edges.

"Fine," they grumbled, and with Hikaru adding a mutter of "I can't feel the faith 'cause there's none.", they stalked over to the over-sized, over-enthusiastic Tamaki-bunny.

Kyouya wasn't surprised when he had to cough another time, after all, he had done this ever so often all morning,

He wasn't even surprised by not quite warm fingers gliding across his forehead.

"I'm sorry for-" Haruhi stopped herself, blinked and continued to press her hand against hot skin, "I don't even know why I'm apologizing for them."

Kyouya regarded the girl before him. "I might."

Haruhi, being Haruhi, just shrugged and didn't ask further.

"I think your temperature is a little high," she let him know and the not quite warmth faded from his forehead.

"My clinical thermometer this morning would beg to differ." Kyouya made a considerable effort to make the cough those words came out in seem completely intentional.

"I'm sure," Haruhi said in a tone he certainly wasn't surprised about (and that made him consider accruing to her debt).

What surprised Kyouya though, were fingers not his own, straightening, pulling, tightening.

He observed the knot Haruhi had made into his tie.

It was sloping on the left, still quite loose and looked as if it might fall apart at any moment.

His gaze wandered to Haruhi. "That was executed without any skill at all."

"You're welcome," she informed him with a roll of her eyes.

Then, there was a muffled shriek coming from within the depths of pink fur accompanied by two not so muffled snickers.

Haruhi, ever the twin disaster prevention control, went to investigate across the room without any haste.

Yet, before she did, big brown eyes gazed up at Kyouya. "You should lie down for a few minutes, just in case your thermometer mightn't be begging to differ anymore."

Rather watching her make her way across the room than heeding her advice, Kyouya, being Kyouya, didn't lie down, of course.

But not once that day he bothered to retie a knot executed without any skill at all.

Sometimes, the twins would even forget they were playing (but never what the reward was supposed to be).

When Haruhi entered, she encountered darkness.

Among the darkness, she found a single pool of light.

It took one or two moments for her eyes to adjust and her mind to catch up.

The second it did, she realized someone had drawn the curtains of every window in their clubroom shut, of every window but one.

Standing against this lonely window, bathed in sunlight, she could make out the silhouette of Tamaki.

Five steps, two more and she was beside him.

Tamaki inclined his head towards her, the only sign he had noticed her, and continued his surveying of the school grounds below.

"I'm very lucky," the boy whispered to no one in particular, not even to the girl beside him,

"To have all of you as my friends."

Haruhi noted that Tamaki's voice, lacking its usual volume, sounded completely different.

Without any of the two being aware of it, they took a step closer to each other.

For three heartbeats, two breaths, one moment, they shared a silence.

Another breath afterwards, Tamaki was the one to break it when he faced her, the sunlight tinting his features a shade of glowing softness.

"Do you think we… That is… Could we write each other letters?"

Haruhi's answer was a stare.

"Tamaki-sempai," she said, something like exasperation in her tone, even though there was a smile hidden in the corners of her mouth, "You're going to attend Tokyo University. We can even phone, if you want to."

Tamaki scratched the back of his head. "I was just…"

"I know," she told him and took his hand into hers, "But we're friends, aren't we?"

Tamaki's face acquired several shades of a very dark colour. "I…" 

He stared at their linked hands.

"Haruhi," he whispered, everything about him soft with light, "You're so…"

By now an expert in rich bastard behaviour patterns, Haruhi braced herself in anticipation.

"…so cute!" Tamaki shouted, his volume returned, and crushed her to him in a forceful hug that knocked all the anticipation right out of her.

"We're going to talk on the phone very single day! Oh, and of course, we'll share all _your _innermost secrets and then we'll be the best friends ever and then you can't help but to confess all your passionate (completely pure!) feelings for m-"

Tamaki stuttered.

Haruhi tilted her head at Tamaki's rapidly darker turning face, by now srely permanently attached to his skin.

"Your feelings for… er…"

"Why, for this attractive set of twins, of course," two sly voices sneaked up on them the same way two pairs of arms did around a certain commoner.

(Completely coincidentally, Tamaki's hands had to be pried off that very same commoner to do so.)

"Who, by the way, are having their rights reserved on the title of 'best friends'."

Tamaki felt the lack of Haruhi in his arms and set his face into rant mode.

"You lecherous imps! Shouldn't you be obeying Kyouya's orders from his sick bed?"

"All slaved off, all costumes finished," Kaoru was (suspiciously) happy to inform his king, "That means no more orders for us…"

"…and more playtime with our toy," Hikaru finished and drew even closer to Haruhi, who was already sandwiched between him and his brother.

Tamaki attacked with a screech and crammed a marvellous amount of red hair into his hands, wrenching and yanking.

Haruhi just gave a sigh, was tugged into painful directions, and checked her wrist watch, only to sigh yet again.

There was a particular hard tug, a falling sensation, an engulfing warmth.

"Hey there," Kaoru greeted, grinning widely at his function as the safety cushion for Haruhi's fall.

The girl blinked at him, their noses barely brushing against each other. "Didn't we talk about you stopping this kind of thing?"

"Saw nothing sharp there," he observed the obvious while Hikaru warded off an enraged Tamaki with a drawled "We just won her fair and square, tono, so back off."

Kaoru gave her a contemplative look, his grin growing even wider. "You know, you could always kiss it better."

"No, I couldn't," Haruhi stated bluntly and detangled her limbs from his, "It's scientifically proven that kissing anything better doesn't work."

With a third glance at her watch, she stood up and slowly walked past a squabbling Hikaru and Tamaki, in direction of the exit.

Kaoru was up in a rush, dragging his brother along, away from his first-rate insult-serving with Tamaki, and after their toy.

"Bye tono," he called out whereas Hikaru waved at Tamaki in departing, a grin as wide as his twin's on his lips, "Business calls. We've got to measure Haruhi."

By then, Tamaki's face was very dark for completely different reasons. "You two-faced imps! You already did that!"

"Yeah, but her old costume was bo-oring," they exclaimed as one while Haruhi, face void of expression, twisted back to them, "So, we decided to change it. She'll be a teddy bear now."

Tamaki was left sputtering at a closed door.

Most days though, the twins played by all those rules that didn't exist.

Warmth and touch settled on either side of Haruhi.

Sitting on a couch in a terribly fuzzy and warm teddy bear get-up, plush-ears sticking out from her hair, she didn't look up from the university brochures in her lap.

With a simultaneous whine of "Haru-hiii", fingers started to ghost over her forearms and face, the only body parts not covered by her costume.

Haruhi found the ease with which the twins were able to wear their bright orange cat costumes mildly disturbing.

(Perhaps, she thought, it was the lack of metres upon metres of thick fuzzy fabric not restricting their movements.)

There was another whine of her name and was Kaoru… purring?

Her look went to her right arm, checked once, twice, and she shook it slightly.

"There's still more than half an hour left before the first girls arrive," she said after checking for a third time, "So, don't say. You're bored."

"Yup." They grinned at her. "And it's your duty as our toy to entertain us."

Haruhi tried to shrug and found the twins hadn't left enough distance between their bodies for her to do so effectively. "Well then, why don't you go do some un-boring."

"Can't," both twins intoned lazily and leaned right into her face, their glued-on whiskers scraping along her cheek, "Too bored for that."

Sighing, Haruhi stuffed her brochures into the schoolbag at her feet, less one of the twins might deem doing… something to them temporarily entertaining.

"Not even Kyouya is ordering us around by phone," Kaoru complained into her hair and Hikaru snorted, "You'd think he would be healthy twice over again by now." 

"Mhm," Haruhi commented while she had to keep the hairband the plush ears of her costume were attached to from slipping into her eyes for what must be the umpteenth time that day.

"What about Tamaki-sempai?"

"He's busy having a 'strictly private conversation' with our flu case."

Haruhi fumbled with the advanced physics of hair accessories.

"You got bored eavesdropping," she stated, willing gravity to bend to her (non-existent) hair-styling resolve.

The twins lifted an eyebrow each, Kaoru his left, Hikaru his right, as if to say that should've been a given.

"Anyway," they pushed on, "If he's well enough to put up with tono's delusions of 'the grandest common graduation party in existence and don't forgot the dancing, equally common flamingos, Kyouya!' he should be healthy enough-"

"Stop worrying," the girl interrupted them, no-nonsense tone and loss of softness back again.

"He was sick before you made him your harass-victim of the day."

Both brothers went rigid against her at precisely the same moment, tense stillness in all their limbs, a shine to their eyes usually reserved for Hunny when he discovered an especially tasty sweet treat. "How-"

"I told Hikaru before," Haruhi said, a supposedly fixed hairband slipping into her eyes and her expression turned to half a smile for each of them, just a hint of softness in it,

"I just know you."

Rigid tension gave way to boneless relaxation as the twins seemed determined to melt into her and put as less distance between them as possible and replace it with more touch, always more, more, more.

Haruhi thought she might have felt one or both of them tremble at one point, but then again that might have been the sensory overload she was assaulted with.

She heard them breathing in, out, in and the twins' hands might or might not have been touching.

"Ts," Kaoru mumbled at last into her ear and it sounded like an army of endearments pressed into just one word, "No sense of fashion whatsoever."

"We'll just have to fix her and share the work," Hikaru said a tad more gruffly, a bit louder than his twin, his army just as large, "You take her right side and I the left."

Haruhi heard the differences in their similarity.

They knew she did (and that made all the difference).

So, the twins let their hands wander across her hair, each at his side, easily fixing and defying all those laws of hair styling gravity that always seemed to work against Haruhi.

And, as her vision became fur-free again, Haruhi, amidst professional and less professional touches, wondered at the fur of her costume for barely a second.

Then Haruhi, never one for being curious, simply dismissed it without another thought.

Who had ever heard of a blue teddy-bear anyway?

Stages after this, all levels of difficulty tried, the game took its players for a turn they didn't find in the least amusing.

"Kaoru?" Hikaru asked, standing just a joining of hands away from his brother.

There was no answer and he didn't need one, for both of their eyes were full of slim waist, slender neck, brown eyes, just the whole distance of half a room away.

Together, they watched Haruhi congratulate an ecstatic Tamaki (who was crushing her to him, ever so often) a still pale looking Kyouya (who was smiling at her in his usual way, just fake enough to appear real) on their graduation.

"Whatever we're doing," Hikaru said just when a not very amused Haruhi was being whirled around the room by Tamaki (and through a throb of other not very amused students), "I don't think it's working."

This time, his brother faced him. "You want us to stop?"

"No way!" Hikaru cried out, just a bit too loud, a bit too forceful.

A few passing students gave them those strange looks the twins had been blind to by the age of ten.

"No," Hikaru continued, quieter, calmer, but with just as much vehemence, "No, I… It's just… argh. Argh."

Out of the corners of his eyes, Kaoru took notice of the fleeting moment Kyouya's smile appeared too real to be fake.

A smile at something Haruhi, just escaped from Tamaki's clutches, had said to him.

"I know," he whispered softly to his twin, "She's part of our world."

Hikaru dug his fingers into his hands, just deep enough for it to hurt. "Yeah, but that doesn't mean a thing if we aren't part of hers."

Neither said something after this.

Instead, they buried their hands into their pockets, as deep as they could.

Between them, a whole distance remained.

Minutes, hours, days ran through their fingers, by their eyes, too fast for them to catch up.

An indefinite amount of time later, (they would only get lost determining how much later exactly), six boys sat together at a table, awaiting a girl.

She arrived breezing through the door of the restaurant, her cheeks faintly flushed and a calm explanation ready. "I'm sorry I'm late. I couldn't find-"

"Doesn't matter," two boys with red hair butted in and still possessing the ability to ignore any glares sent their way, they drew the girl to sit beside them with a pull and a lift of their arms.

Next, Haruhi was assaulted by an arsenal of differing greetings; hugs, cries, smiles, nods, looks.

Used to all this noise and the sometimes bruise-inducing attention, Haruhi shifted in her dress, her movements made awkward by the unfamiliar piece of clothing.

(A few days prior, Tamaki had shoved a dozen dresses into her arms and insisted she chose one.

Naturally, she had refused, until he had asked her to wear it as his 'parting gift'.

He had been dismayed, however, to discover she had selected the simplest one, which lacked any delightful amount of frills or bows.)

"How do you like it?" Tamaki asked her, his voice hinting at a lack of volume she remembered from features tinted in light.

Haruhi looked around the room from beneath arms, hands, fingers braiding, styling, fixing her hair, because the twins appeared to have taken it upon themselves lately to save her from her 'sure sense for anti-fashion'.

(Apparently, this meant they took any opportunity they could to do her hair and put her into girly clothes.

She still had absolutely no idea where they hid all those fancy dresses and hair extensions, not to mention their seemingly infinite supply of hairspray.

For some reason, she also supposed she was better off not knowing.)

Tamaki had held steadfastly unto his idea of a 'commoner graduation party'.

Of course, 'commoner graduation party' had translated into Tamaki renting a whole middle class restaurant for a day, not that far away from Haruhi's own neighbourhood.

But by then, Haruhi had already been exhausted enough by getting Tamaki to realize that dancing flamingos weren't all that common animals.

For that reason, she wasn't shocked to find a large banquet on her right, consisting of delicious looking dishes she knew for a fact weren't on the menu of this restaurant.

The table next to the banquet, solely dedicated to drinks of all kind, even the bottle of sparkling champagne on it, she had fully expected.

Then she discovered the soft music resounding around the room wasn't coming from a tape at all, but being played by an actual string quartet.

'Commoner party indeed,' she thought wryly and turned back to a wide-eyed Tamaki.

"It's…" Haruhi struggled for the right words in face of Tamaki's anticipation.

"…too much for just the seven of us."

Wide eyes got wider.

"Ah, my sweet deprived daughter," he said and leaned forward to ruffle her hair (and thus undid all the twins' work, which was effectively a declaration of war.),

"Nothing's common enough for us at our commoner graduation party, isn't that right, Kyouya?"

Mentioned boy took a sip from his glass of especially for the occasion imported table water. "Quite."

Haruhi was about to answer but snapped her mouth shut when she felt herself being hauled away from the twins' renewed administrations, her hair only halfway done.

Next, she was pushed gently from Mori's large arms to a grinning Hunny. "Let's dance," he chirped and dragged her away from the others.

(There were shouts of protest by three of them.

They were more or less effectively quieted by a glance from Mori and his usual stoic silence.

The fourth boy didn't protest.

Instead, he downed the rest of his glass, stood up and walked over to the banquet, to platters full of seafood, he himself held only a minor interest in.)

Not caring that the floor of the restaurant had never been intended for dancing, Hunny twirled Haruhi around eagerly, just one time.

Then he started to lead her smoothly through the motions of some slow dance she couldn't remember the name of, his body movements as poised and controlled as if he were executing a karate stance.

Haruhi saw the changes in his demeanour, noted them and accepted.

Hunny saw her note the changes and accepted the way his stomach clenched as if someone had delivered a particular hard punch to him in training.

"Haru-chan," he heard himself speak, the words simply dropping from his lips, belying the control he had over his body, "You won't continue the Host Club?"

Haruhi shook her head, brown wisps of hair trailing after her as they went through a particular difficult step. "Kaoru and Hikaru don't think it would be the same without all of you."

Hunny moved closer to her in a turn, eyes level with hers and not at all childlike. "But what about you?"

Haruhi tried to keep up with his pace and pondered. "I agree. It'd be too different with just the three of us."

(In the background, the twins went through with their war declaration and perfected the look of Tamaki's suit by setting stylish accents of vanilla pudding.

Tamaki followed suit with a cry of "You'll pay, you double-crossing goblins!" and a gunfire of melon slice projectiles.

Kyouya simply took a step backwards, now standing next to a platter of ootoro, and distanced himself effectively from the battlegrounds.

When Tamaki moved on to flailing around an ice sculpture flamingo (he hadn't been able to resist the pull of the pink birds completely in his preparations), Mori took it upon himself to step between them and start negotiations.

He was immediately covered in chips of ice and pudding leftovers.

Thus, the twins, an admirable amount of fruit salad in their hair, were forcefully banned to the beverages table, while Tamaki, his suite now a nice yellow-brownish shade, had to sulk in a corner next to the string quartet.)

"Tama-chan said you ranked second-best this school term," Hunny's mouth went on without the consent of his mind.

"Yes, though it's a wonder I got any learning done at all," she replied and he saw her looking at the twins, both of them looking right back, champagne flutes in their hands.

"Haruhi," her name fell off his lips along with another punch to his stomach.

She didn't hear him.

He noticed her eyes then, big and brown and very, very full of red hair and mischievous grins.

The music faded into a new piece, their dance ended.

He bowed to Haruhi, watched her smile at him and walk away.

There was a new feeling in his stomach, or an old one, he couldn't decide, one he remembered from his childhood, from every time his father had defeated him with ease and he had met the mat in a hard, painful thud.

Someone, and he just knew it was Mori, put a plate of chocolate cake and a fork into his unresisting hands.

"I'm not hungry," he murmured and took a large greedy mouthful, tasting all the bitterness of sugar and whipped cream on his tongue.

"Mitsukuni-"

"No," Hunny told Mori, not even bothering to look at the middle-sized package he knew to be in his cousin's hands, "I don't want to give it to her now. And I'm really not hungry." 

The rest of his cake was consumed in one swoop.

Mori remained at his side for the rest of the evening, attentive of his cousin's every move.

Hunny's own attention, though, was focused on a girl with large brown eyes full of all the wrong things.

Like red hair, for example, mostly fruit salad free once more, and grazing the heads of two (devilishly handsome, they will have you know) boys who played a game.

Kaoru tried to take the champagne flute from his brother. "I think you've had enough."

"Don't always act like you're the boss of me," Hikaru replied, quite loudly.

And, to prove his point, he downed his flute in one gulp and refilled it straight away, against his brother's objections.

Haruhi went past them rolling her eyes, her mission objectives clear.

Secure a plate, retrieve the ootoro and hide somewhere far away from any possible standard rich bastard interruptions.

Halfway into her mission (the plate had been secured), something solid ran into Haruhi.

(Really, it was that way around, because she could swear that it hadn't been there before.)

"Kyouya-sempai," Haruhi blinked and checked if the impact hadn't broken the plate in her hands, for there was no reason to provoke another accretion to her still very intact debt,

"I didn't see you there."

Kyouya couldn't decide if he should feel mildly annoyed or very amused by the fact that Haruhi was oblivious to his presence as long as there was the right kind of food around.

"You're aware I'm not attending Ouran any longer."

She blinked again, the plate in her hand feeling very empty without any ootoro on it. "You want me to drop the honorific?"

The over the years perfected illusion of a smile on his lips, Kyouya inclined his head. "It'd only be appropriate, don't you think?"

"Fine then," the girl said and turned back to important matters, like say, ootoro.

Kyouya supposed the ease with which he was dismissed called for appropriate repercussions.

He enlarged his illusion. "Would you like to dance?" 

"Actually," she started to say and was cut off before the last syllable had left her mouth.

Behind her, a half-filled plate of ootoro clattered to the ground.

The rest of the night passed for Haruhi in a blur of familiar faces, laughter, one dance after another, and snatches of bickering from the twins.

Surprisingly enough, the first to retire for the night were Tamaki (business trip to Europe with his father the next morning) and Kyouya (inspection of potential universities for a week).

Directly afterwards, Hunny and Mori decided to call it a night and left the restaurant, a package still clutched to the smaller boy's chest.

Hunny was very aware of the weight of Mori's gaze on him.

"I know," he whispered, his shoulders dropped so low Mori instinctively checked his cousin's body for injury, "It's just… She takes me for who I am, without question."

Hunny shifted the package from hand to hand.

"Please, Takashi, you give it to her, tell her it's yours. She'd like sharing it with them better, I suppose."

Mori bowed his head, took the package.

A smile was inflicted upon Hunny's face like a wound, but the drop of his shoulders disappeared.

"Great," he chirped, rubbed at his eyes, "But don't take too long. I'm so tired already!"

With that, he skipped off to their limousine, a bounce to his step, no wounds visible on his body, and left Mori to worry.

Meanwhile, inside the restaurant, it was only Haruhi and platters upon platters of seafood.

(The twins had just walked out, Hikaru leaning heavily on his brother, Kaoru talking wildly into his cell phone.)

Yet, when her hand went for a fork, it was instead guided into a different direction, gently forced as if her bones were fragile, and closed around something white.

Haruhi blinked up at Mori, then stared at the package in her hands and realized that this was definitely not ootoro.

"It's cake," Mori informed her, voice barely above a murmur, "Mitsukuni made it himself."

"Oh?" Haruhi asked and remembered all the male Host Club members' distinctive shortcomings at anything remotely related with cooking.

"Tell him thank you for me."

Mori put a hand to her head, patted it in an almost touch. "You should visit us sometime. You could teach him how not to burn everything he makes."

Haruhi's smile was plain, simple, just a smile and absolutely beautiful. "I'll try."

That was enough for him and so, he nodded and pulled his hand back, nearly brushing her left cheek as he went.

With a last almost glance at her, Mori took off, out of the restaurant, past a pair of distressed twins, back to his waiting cousin.

Still inside the restaurant, Haruhi, having made sure Hunny's gift wasn't squished in her arms, finally, finally managed to take up a fork and-

"Haruhi?" Kaoru asked, poking his head back into the restaurant, trying to restrain his twin on the outside, "I need your help."

Haruhi considered.

Hikaru chose that moment to poke in his head as well, declaring in a slurred speech,

"The flower of youth blooms in spring and yes, I'd like some apples with that."

With a sigh, Haruhi bid farewell to her last chance at seafood goodness for the night.

Then she stalked outside, to a crookedly grinning Hikaru and a decidedly pale Kaoru, the package held in her arms, and looked at them expectantly.

Kaoru released a long suffering sigh and gave Hikaru his patented 'told you so'-glare. "See, Haruhi, the thing is… Hikaru's drunk."

"Your breasts are really tiny," Hikaru notified her, happily leaning half on his weight on her, half on his brother, "'Like them anyway, all nice and firm."

"Really drunk," Kaoru added and elbowed his brother sharply into his side.

Haruhi staggered slightly under the added weight of half a twin. "So what?"

Kaoru shifted, just once, while his twin waggled his eyebrows at the girl. "Could we crash at your place for the night?"

"No," Haruhi stated, ducked out from underneath Hikaru's heavy limbs and began to walk away.

They hurried after her. That is, Kaoru did. Hikaru did more of a wobbling, barely upholding kind of thing.

"Please, Haruhi, our mother would have our heads if she knew…"

Hikaru staggered one more time and hit the ground, hard, and laughing.

"…this," Kaoru ended, "Please, just for tonight and we promise to behave. Don't we?"

"Yeah, yeah," his twin muttered, momentarily transfixed by the incredible amazing texture of his own hands. "Promise whatever."

Haruhi didn't answer although she slowed down a bit.

"You'd spare us a lot of trouble," the sober brother continued.

"Please, it'd really mean a lot to us."

Pondering the both of them with a backward glance and the novelty of hearing one of them use the word 'please', Haruhi felt her practical side wrestling with her nurturing one.

"Fine," she relented in the end, before they started the puppy eyes-treatment on her, "But we'll walk." (A compromise (pay-back) both of her sides had agreed to.)

"Walk?" the twins asked as one, Hikaru suddenly coherent enough to follow their conversation.

"Yes, walking, my flat is just two blocks away, you want to get there, you walk,"

Haruhi picked up her faster pace again.

The twins glanced at the other and started to walk, matching grins on their faces.

After listening to Hikaru's interpretation of every single song figment he could remember strung together, three times, each croakier and more innuendo-laden than the last, Haruhi had a whole new appreciation for the opening click of the front door of her home.

"Hush now," she whispered, the twins squeezing into the flat after her, "My dad's still working but we might get in trouble with our landlord."

The twins zipped their mouths shut, whereas Hikaru seemed to have aimed more for his nose.

With a shake of her head, Haruhi slipped out of her shoes and momentarily placed the package next to them.

"Drop the act. It's physically impossible to get drunk on cranberry juice."

Hikaru and Kaoru paused in taking off their respective shoes, looked at each other.

They started to laugh, low, deep, amused, at the same time.

"Aw, look," Hikaru panted out in-between beats of laughter, miraculously all sobered up

"Our toy noticed us this evening. A shame, when it was such a good scheme, too."

"How… Why?" was all Kaoru got out, for once he being the one to lean against his brother, his body shaking with mirth.

Haruhi disappeared in a room, not responding.

When she returned, hands full of blankets, the twins had calmed down mostly, dual grins splitting their faces into half.

Nonchalantly, she handed them two blankets each. "I figured if you went through all this trouble, it must mean a lot to you to sleep on my cold, hard floor."

"What?" Hikaru cried, mock-scandalized, "You mean we aren't going to share a bed?"

Haruhi rolled her eyes for what must have been way too many times that day as Kaoru bend down to pick up the white package. "You got a secret admirer?"

Immediately, Hikaru's face appeared at his brother's shoulder, inspecting the all of a sudden very threatening package.

"Has to be more of a secret assassin the way this smells," he corrected, sniffing at the contents of the package.

"It was a gift," Haruhi insisted impassively and took the package from them, "You've to treat something like that with respect."

"Not if it's out to kill you," Hikaru muttered into his brother's ears, who snickered as they trailed after Haruhi into the living room.

"Hikaru, Kaoru, meet the floor," she told them dryly, placing the package atop the living room table.

The twins suspected they were (finally!) having some kind of bad influence on her.

They plunked down beside the table, the blankets spread between them, and exchanged a glance they shared with Haruhi.

"We're hungry. Fix us something."

"I'm not your maid," she explained to them calmly, "You want something, you go get it yourselves."

The twins managed the physical impossibility to broaden their grins.

For barely a second, Haruhi's world turned to a whirl of colours and forms.

When everything came to a halt again, she was seated on the floor, flanked by the twins, one of Hikaru's arms around her waist, one of Kaoru's around her shoulders.

"What-"

"Well, we got us something we wanted," Hikaru drawled and to his words clung the faint smell of cranberries.

"All on our own, too," Kaoru took up for his brother, his fingers drawing lazy circles on her bare shoulders, "Aren't you proud of us?"

"Yeah, where's our reward for being good little students?"

"I'm going to bed exactly about… now," Haruhi declared bluntly and started to extract herself from their grips with an expertise born by two years of constant Host Club-commoner abuse.

"Wait, wait," Kaoru called out, frantically searching his pockets.

"We got your wrist watch," Hikaru stated, seeming more than satisfied with himself.

Haruhi didn't pause in her detangling. "If you do, it'll still be there after I've slept. Besides, if you have it, I'm sure you stole it from me."

"Stealing is such a harsh word," Hikaru admonished and tightened his grip around her waist right as Kaoru presented her a small green box,

"We merely repaired it." 

Haruhi stared at the contents of the box, temporarily forgetting all about untangling. "That isn't my watch."

"Repaired, improved, it's all the same." Hikaru whisked her to the floor again and Kaoru dropped the box into her lap.

"Yeah, we repaired it by buying a new one."

"Thanks, but I can't accept this," Haruhi said and meant it, "My old watch worked just fine for me." 

It was the twins' time to roll their eyes. "Oh, pluu-ease. Did you think we wouldn't notice you running around with a misbehaving wrist watch all year?"

Haruhi still insisted on pushing the box back at Kaoru, who persisted in not taking it back.

"It's a gift," they declared, their grins turning into to smirks, "You've got to treat a gift with respect."

Haruhi didn't make another attempt to shove the box back, which the twins took as (albeit reluctant) acceptance.

In an instant, Kaoru had fastened the watch around her wrist.

Its material felt soft against her skin and she had to discover it also fit perfectly.

Lips brushed against her forehead in something you might call a kiss and she was trapped between a pair of arms in something that could have been an embrace.

What she knew to be two voices mingled into a joined caress against her ears she was completely oblivious to.

"We know you." 

Limbs were draped over hers, skin was claimed.

"Just stay five more minutes," their one voice pleaded in a whisper.

Haruhi sighed, completely blank-faced, and knew they wouldn't leave her in peace for the rest of the night if she didn't grant their request.

"Okay," she told them in another sigh, "Just five more minutes."

She could feel them grinning into her neck and draw even closer to her with a one-voiced repeat of "Just five more minutes."

Just five more minutes turned to eight, then fourteen and there was talk and laughter and three slices of a shared burned cake.

Half an hour found one of them yawning, the others draping their own blankets around the tired one, two more slices of cake gone, touch flowing freely between them.

An hour and two minutes and there was no more cake, the taste of coal on all their tongues, the tired one fast asleep against the others, all three lying on the floor.

"Somehow," one of the others voices rang out, "I thought sleeping next to Haruhi would be less uncomfortable."

"And, per chance, involve less cold, hard floor?" Kaoru shot back, a bundle of warmth, blankets and asleep Haruhi shifting against him.

"Yeah, that too," Hikaru snickered, his fingers tangling themselves further in brown tresses,

"Want to know something funny?"

He brushed his right hand, the one not tangled in hair, across his twin's.

"I feel… kind of bad… for having done this."

"So do I," Kaoru murmured with a look at a face not completely soft and relaxed in sleep, "I also don't regret it."

"Me neither," Hikaru whispered, the warmth of two other bodies close to him.

They shared a glance, in the dark of the room, over Haruhi's sleeping form, more having to guess at the other's expression than actually seeing it.

But then again, they never had had to see the other to know his state of mind.

"We're in so deep we can't get out anymore, uh?" Hikaru stated in front of the frown he knew to be on his twin's face, "I mean you still got that stupid paper bird thing and think I wouldn't notice."

Kaoru sent his brother a glare he was sure to catch. "There are worse places to be." 

Haruhi turned around, realising a sigh, sleepy, soft, glorious, unlike her usual sighs.

"Maybe," Hikaru whispered and then added,

"Want to know something even funnier?"

After a pause where both read the other in the dark, Hikaru went on, "I'm scared shitless."

"Scared?" Kaoru sniggered and was secure in the knowledge that Hikaru would get his meaning, "Try terrified."

"I still don't regret it." 

"Neither do I."

As one, they closed off any distance left, their free hands joining, caging a sleeping girl between them.

"You know," Hikaru breathed into the dark, into Haruhi's ear, to Kaoru, "Your bird isn't all that stupid."

"Hikaru?" his twin asked, voice soft and toneless with tiredness, "Shut up."

Hikaru complied with a snicker, soon changing into a snore as he joined Haruhi in sleep.

Kaoru let his fingers glide along something stolen, repaired, improved and bought around Haruhi's wrist.

There, trapped between distanced wakefulness and near slumber, Kaoru realized it had never been a question of who of the six of them would get closer to Haruhi, no, his foggy mind supplied him in a second's moment of clarity; it had always been just a matter of time.

That night, he fell into sleep, warmth on all his sides, and drawn around him like a blanket was a wish, a prayer, really, the first one he had ever uttered and meant.

It was a wish, a prayer, for any extension of time he could grasp at, even if it would be just five more minutes.


	3. Folding In

Disclaimer: Ouran is not mine.

Author's note: This chapter and the next one were merely divided for better readability. Read them as one and we'll all be more happy.

By the way, go, worship Verita dea for putting up with all the… weirdness that comes with being my beta-reader.

And worshipping thanks to all those of you who reviewed this. I'm always amazed when someone actually reads what I write. More so, when the reader can be bothered to review.

For an extended author's note on why I'm a really lazy slouch, please see my profile.

**Chapter Three**

There was a funeral.

Too pale faces swam in a sea of black clothes. Emotions were strictly limited to a sob or two and a hiding of the eyes behind a handkerchief. The constant buzz of uttered consolations around them were too many, too meaningless, to be listened to.

Throughout all, Haruhi didn't say a word.

Not until later, much later, the descending of a casket into the ground later, when she and her father were buried in the seat cushions of their train home, the constant rumbling around them a dirge to their ears.

Haruhi turned to him then, a tiny six-year old entombed in too large formal wear and grave seriousness, her eyes barren of any water.

"A lawyer," she told her father and her voice joined in the dirge, "I'll be a lawyer."  
His mind paralyzed by all the memories buried along with a casket, Ryoji didn't even notice himself nodding, didn't feel his daughter's dead-cold hand in his.

But he realized something, fleetingly, for a split second, before his mind dug into memories of dead dirt again.

Haruhi, he thought then, even as his preoccupied mind was caught up in all those memories, had the strangest way to say she was mourning.

Out of the ashes of that day, it was only that realization that provided solid ground for Ryoji, even as he changed his name to Ranka.

Over the years, ever so often, it took him a look at the way Haruhi carried determined seriousness around with her like other girls did with their favorite doll, to realize his ground was still steady.

In fact, the very first noticeable tremors on his very own Ranka-Richter-scale took place on a Sunday morning in March.

Last night, it had been all he could do (after working two double-shifts at the bar) to crash into his bed, face on, fully clothed, make-up bits still clinging to his face. (Ever the dutiful father, he had, of course, checked his daughter's room before embracing the bliss of his soft pillows. It had been empty.)

When he realized he was awake in the morning, his body had already went through all the usual morning motions (brushing his teeth, changing his clothes, using half a bottle of hairspray to fix his bed hair), and manoeuvred him into the living room with full expectations of the usual grand Sunday morning breakfast.

(Haruhi was an (ridiculously) early riser. Telling her sleep in, or that she didn't have to fix all of their meals every day of the week, had about the same effect as telling a five-year old to stop playing with his toys.)

Of course, his expectations were warranted. (Breakfast had been fixed; the living-room table set.)

The problem was with what he hadn't expected to have on his plate along with breakfast.

"Haruhi?" Ranka called out, eyes stuck on something unexpected.

"You're awake already?" his daughter's voice came back and Haruhi entered the living room, just fastening the last two buttons of her blouse. By the looks of her faintly wet hair, she had just come out of the bathroom. "Breakfast isn't completely finished yet." 

"Er…" Ranka took a lipstick out of the pockets of his trousers to apply a new layer to his lips, closed his eyes… "Did you happen to notice…" …and looked again, just to still find something unexpected. "…that someone seems to have misplaced a pair of twins on our floor?" 

"Ah, yes. That." Haruhi shrugged. "After the party, they asked if they could stay the night." 

Ranka still felt this growing urge to apply more lipstick. (Or say, hit his head against the wall. Repeatedly.) "And you let them?" 

(On the floor, covered in blankets and warmth, the twins slept on. Their soft snores just might have been snickers.)

Surveying the breakfast table before her, Haruhi spared her father the slightest of nods. "They said please." 

"And you were home when?" Ranka went on, voice stuck between hushed quiet and loud screeching, "You certainly weren't there when I came back from work. I checked your room." 

"Oh, I was home before you. I just wasn't in my room." Haruhi explained to him very matter-of-fact and very oblivious.

"I slept with them, on the floor." 

The ground underneath Ranka slipped away, just like that.

"We don't have enough bread," she continued, completely unconscious of her father's lack of a melodramatic reaction. (Or, in fact, of any reaction at all.) "I'll just be to the supermarket." 

Haruhi disappeared into the entrance area of their flat.

A moment of shuffling. (Haruhi slipping on her shoes and coat.)

A hesitating, a shift, a click. (Haruhi closing the front door behind her as she left.)

Ranka stood there, in his living room, for a whole eight minutes. Wisps of red hair invaded his vision, images of everything that might have happened to his cute daughter in his mind.

At the beginning of the ninth minute, Ranka snapped his head to the side so fast the resulting crack couldn't even catch up with the motion.

The twins still slept on, blissfully (or dangerously, it all depends on point of view) unaware.

His movements no longer made stiff by sleep, but by something else altogether, he marched over to the twins' sleeping forms. Towering over them, he decided it was time to lay down some ground rules.

Ranka plastered a smile on his lips like a threat.

"Wakey, wakey!" he called most pleasantly and then proceeded to snatch the blankets away from the twins.

He got his wanted result in a groan, a huff, a call of "Oy, you're fir- not a maid," and two pairs of sleep-bleared eyes staring up at him accusingly.

"I believe," Ranka fluted as pleasantly as before, smile-threat in place, leaned down into their faces, "You're due for a pleasant chat with daddy." 

Hence, the three of them were now sitting at the living room table, two vaguely sleepy looking twins at one side, a more than awake Ranka on the other.

Hikaru and Kaoru were fully aware their well practised charm would get them here precisely as far as Ranka could stomp them into the ground. (If severe blood loss wasn't nice enough to make them pass out first.)

Seeing as Haruhi wasn't with them, and judging by her father's reaction, they had long since deducted the girl must have let something (blunt and rather unfavourable for the twins) slip.

The three of them swung politeness around the breakfast table like a weapon.

So, when Ranka asked them if would like a cup of tea, in a quite polite way too, the twins felt quite afraid.

Each perfectly polite smile Ranka threw their way only served to make it worse; each tiny tremble the twins could detect in the perfectly polite smiles of their own intensified the flow.

Nervousness was strung so tight around their bodies, each twin knew one of them would revolt against the restrictions, sooner or later.

Hikaru just so happened to be the sooner one.

It was when Ranka was pouring himself his second cup of tea. The sound of the golden-yellow liquid hitting the porcelain was the loudest silence the twins had ever heard.

Hikaru merely decided to be louder. "We didn't do anything wrong!" 

(Only, they suspected they may have done just that and that made Hikaru shout all the louder.)

With deliberate slowness, Ranka took a sip of his tea.

"Immature spoiled brats," he declared exactly the same way he had asked if they wanted one or two cubes of sugar in their tea.

The table shook under the forcefully added weight of Hikaru's arms, the contents of the twins' untouched tea cups swapped over. "Yeah? And you're-" 

"That's enough," Kaoru butted in, his tone very quiet, yet drawn just as forceful as his twin's.

"Ranka-san, please, tell Haruhi we're sorry." Here, Hikaru inserted an audible snort. "But we have to take care of something at home." 

"Seems someone needs to do some emotional maturing," Ranka remarked serenely, batted heavily made up eyelashes at Hikaru, and took another sip.

Kaoru battled his fingers around Hikaru's hand. He got up, tagging his twin along. Hikaru followed, because one twin always followed the other.

Ranka watched.

His eyes were scalpels trying to dissect the drawn in posture of their limbs, the lack of expression on their faces they seemed to have agreed upon.

Ranka watched them even as they put on their shoes, opened the front door.

Only then did he speak.

His voice was not kinder or softer, but the expression on his face was no longer polite.

"You aren't playing some kind of game with her, are you?" 

The twins paused on doorstep (and Ranka discovered he already couldn't tell anymore which one had been the one to shout).

One twin strengthened his grip on the other twin's hand. There was a tremble or two.

Then, they simultaneously glanced over their shoulders, one over his right, the other over his left, their foreheads so close skin might have touched skin.

For this, Kaoru and Hikaru didn't have to look at each other, not even out of the corners of their eyes.

Their lips moved in perfect synch, words tumbling over their lips along with a realization.

"It's no game, not anymore." 

Silence. (The tick-tick-tick of the wand-clock, breathing in, out, no answer, tick-tick-tick.)

Ranka regarded them.

And before he shut the front door behind the two of them that morning, he might even have told the twins something along the lines of "I'll see you around," or, "Goodbye".

Still, they didn't feel satisfied.

Not when the chauffeur they had ordered for pulled up their Rolls Royce next to them.

Not when they caught just a hint of brown hair and brown eyes further down the street as they got in the car.

Not when, inside the limousine, one twin turned to the other, facial features immovable and said:

"It doesn't matter what he thinks," the immovable features of his face moved and he added:

"Right?" 

"Right," his twin confirmed, a tad bit too late, a tad bit too firmly. (Both needed to hear the other lying, once in a while.)

And most certainly not when, later that day, they were laying on a single bed, each twin at another rim of the mattress, the thick linen blankets around them feeling not as warm as thin wool blankets and an added body had.

(Earlier, between this not when and the not when before, the twins had had an encounter with their mother.

It went mostly like this:

"Hi, mom," one twin had greeted, already disappearing up the stairs, to their room.

Their mother, left downstairs with a "Bye, mom," from the other twin, hadn't even bothered to call after them anymore (hadn't for a long time since).)

"It shouldn't matter," the one twin, Hikaru, his name was Hikaru, muttered his words along his pillow.

"No, it shouldn't," the other twin, Kaoru, he knew himself to be Kaoru, whispered into the distance between them.

They took in each other in three breaths.

"I think he likes you more than me," Hikaru exhaled the words along with their fourth breath.

"It doesn't matter," Kaoru declared in the same breath. "He can't tell us apart. Chances are, he likes you more half of the time." 

Hikaru snorted, turned away from his brother. (For the sake of pretending at the smallest bit of privacy between them, of pretending Kaoru wouldn't know the expression on his face from the rigid set of clenched muscles if Hikaru turned away just far enough.)

Suddenly, there was a whole new distance between them.

"When did something so easy get so frigging complicated?" Hikaru asked of, no, demanded of his brother. "When did we stop playing?" 

"Doesn't matter," Kaoru repeated, and it sounded like another prayer, another wish. "Doesn't matter." 

Hikaru snorted. "It's not fun anymore," he said almost thoughtfully, "This isn't what I signed up for." 

"In too deep, remember?" Kaoru asked, his intonation soft where his brother's was harsh.

"Yeah, yeah," his twin mumbled, barely audible, his voice getting weaker by the second.

"He's just her father. It really doesn't matter." 

They both listened to the ensuing silence before their voices blended into one, resounding around the room.

"Doesn't matter." 

Yet, for the rest of the night, Hikaru's back stayed turned to his twin.

Kaoru knew so for sure, because his eyes remained open the whole time.

For days, over a month, too long, Kaoru saw a lot of his brother's back. (When Hikaru walked away, stood away, slept away from Kaoru.)

Whenever he would glance at his brother, it seemed Hikaru would just so happen to turn away from him and Kaoru would be left to watch his back until his eyes started to burn through his eyelids and he would have to blink.

It was childish thing, a silly thing; and it hurt like hell.

Kaoru would look.

Hikaru would turn away.

Kaoru would blink.

And the whole procedure would start all over again.

By the time April came around, Kaoru was tired of looking, Hikaru was tired of turning and both twins were mildly stressed (and highly bored) by school.

And if the twins were mildly stressed (and highly bored), you could add their weight in levels of stress to the already considerable (partly self-imposed) work load of one Haruhi Fujioka.

"No", "I don't have time" and "that isn't your 'insert body part' no matter how many times you claim so and I know so because 'insert body part' is still attached to me, 'insert twin's name'", were the sentences she armed herself with against the twins' entertainment demanding nature in that time.

"Yes", "Just five more minutes" and "I know it isn't my 'inset body part' I just happen to find this one nicer", were the sentences the twins slipped past any resistance Haruhi might have put up.

Not that Haruhi didn't try.

"No," she insisted, her face stuck behind a schoolbook like it had been since the beginning of the school year.

"Yes," the twins begged to differ, and brought themselves as close to her as possible to fix her latest 'hair-styling-catastrophe'. (Haruhi's 'hair-styling' consisted of running a comb through her hair. Fleetingly. When she remembered.)

(In the classroom around them, most of the female students were taking in their exchange greedily, their eyes bouncing like balls to whoever was speaking. Every once in wile there was a squeal or a sigh.)

"No," Haruhi repeated and rearranged her grip on her schoolbook as if advanced Japanese history could be used to somehow ward off the twins' elaborate schemes.

"Let's see," the twins chimed, grins painted on their faces in extra long-lasting colour.

"You're one no. We're two yes." 

At that point, forewarned by her temples announcing the start of another headache, Haruhi was aware she was in for another session in the amazing world of bizarre twin mathematics.

(The twins went on, undaunted by Haruhi's less than devious attempt to try to disappear behind her book.)

"This equals you being outvoted. And that means…" By then, they had already fidgeted about so much, they were sitting on their own stools by the stretch of imagination only. (Haruhi's lap was ten times more comfortable anyway.)

"…this Saturday, you'll go out with us." 

(The girls, suffering from a severe lack of Host Club hosting erupted into a fit of high-pitched giggles and squeals.)

"Idiots," Haruhi called the twins, not unkindly and turned a page of her book against the restraints of two pairs of arms around her. "I don't have time." 

"Ah, you hear that?" Kaoru tilted Haruhi's chin slightly up with his index finger, as if to scrutinize her. "I think that was the sweet sound of surrender." 

Haruhi briefly considered biting down on his finger, hard. (Right afterwards, her more practical side pointed out to her it wouldn't be worth the ensuing drama. Not to mention all the resulting innuendos.) "More like the sound of me despairing." 

Another blob of red hair and amber eyes blocked her line of vision to her schoolbook, along with a suitable distractive comment.

"No, it definitely had a ring of 'We all know I just can't resist your devilish handsome looks and charming personalities. I'm just playing hard to get.'" 

Haruhi slammed her book shut, manoeuvred her way out of the joined efforts of their grabbing. She made a statement by pushing her desk a full one or two inches forward.

Tiredly, Kaoru locked his gaze on Hikaru's back. "Correction. Very hard to get." 

Hikaru clenched his fists, ever so unnoticeable. (Kaoru, of course, had always noticed all those unnoticeable things about his twin.) "We'll just have to-" 

Haruhi chose that moment to turn back, no book before her to hide her face. She looked directly at them, directly at Kaoru. "I'll have to do my grocery shopping this Saturday." 

Hikaru unclenched his unnoticeable clenched fists; the twin's desks were pushed forward to their usual place, next to Haruhi's. Their grins were more of a smile than anything else.

"It's a date," they echoed as one.

The automatic response of no died in Haruhi's throat, barely a breath before their history teacher walked in and started class, not noticeable at all for anyone, really.

The only problem with that was, some time between this moment and a lot of moments before, the twins had begun to notice all those unnoticeable things about Haruhi, as well. 

When Saturday came around, the twins were ready.

Dressed in matching expensive outfits, the same sly grin and differing vague hopes, they rung the bell beside the front door of the Fujioka household at half past one, sharp.

One minute past half past one, sharp, Haruhi opened them, dressed in something spectacularly boring, a smile too small for her lips and a subtle good mood.

"You're a bit early," she told them bluntly, her eyebrows rising as if this was the most wondrous occasion.

"Yeah, well, hello to you too," they replied, the slyness percentage of their grins rising. They squeezed into the flat at either side of her.

And froze.

They didn't hear when Haruhi closed the door again, for the flat was filled with laughter, loud, amused, impolite.

Ranka's laughter. Ranka's voice reverberating around with another one, pitched deeper, less loud, more polite.

The twins didn't like this, not one bit.

Haruhi cocked her head at them, her eyebrows raised.

"It's just Kyouya." 

The twins shook the freezing of their limbs. Then, without seeming to have moved, they leaned in close to prey in on her. "Whatever happened to the -sempai?" they demanded.

Haruhi blinked, four times, two times at each of them and slipped past them to put on her shoes. "He asked me to drop it. So I did." 

More laughter came out of the living room. The two voices gave away all the right sounds of a genuinely pleasant conversation.

It made Hikaru glare at Haruhi, accusation and unreason equally hot in the harsh lines of his face. "What's he doing here anyway? Isn't he supposed to be at some smart-ass-fancy business school in Okinawa?" 

Haruhi shrugged. There was nothing apologetic whatsoever in the motion and it made Hikaru glare all the harder. "Tamaki-sempai had to go on another business trip with his father. He asked Kyouya to give me my fortnightly check up in his stead." 

Another bout of laughter, this time the loudest, the most impolite.

Haruhi shrugged, again, more at Hikaru than at Kaoru, as unapologetic as before. "My dad sure isn't complaining about the change." 

Hikaru opened his mouth and Kaoru could feel the volume of what his twin was about to say grind through him in harsh, clipped, non-spoken tones.

Kaoru drove his elbow into his brother's side, the tiniest bit of harshness he put into the blow testimony of his own tenseness.

"You mean tono visits often?" Kaoru inquired, as calmly as he could with Hikaru glaring at him, with laughter and amused bits of conversation drifting around them.

"Mostly, he just phones," Haruhi pondered if it would be so cold outside she would need a coat. "Mostly as in everyday. And there is the odd visit, once in while." 

Making the decision for her, Kaoru dropped the coat on her head, so that Haruhi was swallowed by the folds of the brown fabric. (Even if he had done it more in the hopes of the fabric drowning out the string of curses Hikaru let out next.)

By the time Haruhi had fought her arms properly into the coat, a back had been turned, a door slammed.

A question was exchanged in a glance.

"He'll wait for us outside," Kaoru said, "I think." 

"Mhm," Haruhi commented, shifted in her coat and turned her face in direction of the living room.

"Dad," she called," We'll be going to the supermarket." 

There was some kind of answer from Ranka, a brief appearance of Kyouya in the frame of the living room door, an exchange of pleasantries.

Next, they were out the front door, where Hikaru, his hands buried deep into his pockets, was waiting and tried to look for the entire world as if he wasn't. 

Approximately twenty-three minutes and two seconds later, between the convenience food of isle eight and isle seven, fruit and vegetables, Hikaru didn't turn around to his brother.

But he dug his hands out of his pockets, exhaled.

"Sorry," he told a can of black eyed-peas, "I'm sorry." 

"No matter," Kaoru replied easily, because it didn't matter, never had.

When Kaoru looked this time, there was no turned back, only Hikaru, looking right back.

Together, they caught up to Haruhi a few feet ahead.

Each on a different side of her, they took the shopping basket from her to cling to her hands as if she were a life preserver. 

From April to June, in countless moments, sometime, somewhere, the twins discovered they had fit Haruhi into their world like a previously unexplored white spot.

(Us now entailed three persons and it was the most natural thing, just like all the Others still were Them.)

Hikaru would see Haruhi nibble at her pen, her lips pursed, pondering a particular tricky question of her math homework, and he would know his brother was watching her with a grin, his own homework forgotten.

Kaoru would notice Haruhi looking up, up, up at him, directly at him, whenever she had something to say to him, and was very aware of Hikaru's facial expression in response to what she was saying without ever having to look.

Or both brothers would watch her trying to stifle the sixth yawn that day, the drop of her shoulders, and knew that they were both wearing the same deep-hard-etched frown since the first time Haruhi had yawned that morning in English class.

The seventh yawn was yawned during lunch break. Haruhi's scheme to tarn it as a bite into a home-made rice ball was so poorly executed (the yawn was so wide she swallowed the rice ball whole and started to choke), Hikaru felt obliged to take her face into his hands.

"Mhm," he murmured, tilted her face to the right, to the left. "You know, those circles under your eyes go along nicely with your too pale complexion." 

Kaoru was right beside his brother, his voice a whisper in her ears. "Yeah, you must have put so much work into that look. Trying to impress us?" 

Haruhi gathered her breath, expertly shifted her rice grain covered face away from Hikaru.

Selfless gentlemen the twins were, they took care of those rice grains in a way reminiscent of their cookie crumble cleansing technique.

(Their all time background chorus erupted into a cacophony of variously high-pitched squeals.)

Haruhi glanced first at Hikaru, then at Kaoru. (And she knew they would be looking right back, the expression hidden behind their smirks insisting on the seriousness of their playful words.)

She sighed. "It's… Tamaki-sempai. He insists on calling every night, talking for hours about how his studying to become a teacher is coming along. I've to stay up extra late to get my workload done." 

"Wait, wait, wait." 

The twins stared at her as if she had just proclaimed she was having an affair with her calculus textbook. (They had always suspected.) "A teacher? You mean tono's going to be a teacher?" 

Haruhi started to nibble at another rice ball, needing all her patience to control the twin-induced urge to roll her eyes. "He only told you what? About twenty times since his graduation?" 

The twins didn't bother to control their urge to shrug their shoulders. "Yeah, well, we tune him out when…" They shared a look. "Okay, we always tune him out." 

She took a crushing bite of her rice ball, one of the first warning signals she was none too happy with them.

"But that's beside the point," Kaoru relented (even if his idea of relenting was somewhat lacking), and his brother followed up with:

"Yeah, the point is, Tamaki. A teacher. A thought that strikes terror in my heart." 

Haruhi took an even larger bite. "I think he'll be just fine." 

A shudder went through the twins, Haruhi the catalyst between them.

"'Undiluted minds' molded by French fairy principles and violet unicorn principles." 

The rest of the rice ball was gulped down, a new one taken, a clear warning sign. "You-" 

"Imagine," the twins clutched at each other, crushing Haruhi between them. "Thousands of students. The future of Japan. Tamaki-fied." 

A rice ball was dropped to the floor.

The twins snickered so hard she could feel it pulse through her whole frame.

"Spontaneous rose petal shower apparitions and elaborate first class delusions; everywhere." 

Before Haruhi could answer, the gong to class rang and the twins hoisted her up, (schoolbag and lunchbox and all).

(Their newest idiosyncrasy was to completely ignore the small personal bubble of one mm they had granted her before.)

"Just so you know," Hikaru remarked conversationally to Haruhi's legs slung over his shoulders. "I just decided our children are going to be home-schooled, in a Tamaki-free zone." 

Reacting with a lack of reaction, Haruhi stared blank-faced at the front of Kaoru's blazer she was being pressed against and took the last rice ball Kaoru offered her out of her annexed lunchbox.

"We got it all planned out," he informed the strands of brown hair tickling the tip of his nose,

"You're getting two boys first, twins, of course. They'll get our devious brilliance and your head for smarts. With our combined stunning genes, they'll bring world peace," his expression turned thoughtful, there was a hint of pre-paternal pride in his voice.

"Or world domination." 

"Or they're just going to terrorize tono's children," Hikaru snickered. "Whatever comes first." 

Sighing, Haruhi mentally started to revise their last French lesson, in preparation for today's class. "I'm not even going to get a stuffed toy for a pet until I'm an established layer." 

"Aw, c'mon," Hikaru drawled, while they made their way through throngs of students. (Who were complaining, or giggling, or throwing odd glances at them like accusations. At least two of them were blind to it all, as those were the Others and the three of them made a world of their own.)

Kaoru wiped a mock-tear from his eyes. "What kind of mother are you if you don't even give Takumi and Daiki a chance?" 

Any further revising refused to be prepared as Haruhi took up formulating a stunning theory.

"You actually… named fictional concepts born from your minds in a moment of boredom?" 

Hikaru shifted his grip on Haruhi, deposited her in her seat at her desk at the same time Kaoru shrugged off her school bag and put her bento box inside, in a single, fluid motion.

"Sure we did," they declared, slinging down in the chairs adjacent to hers. "Currently we're at the names for our grand-grand children. We tell you, we make quite the handsome imaginary grandfathers." 

(If any of the surrounding girls found it odd the twins were considering having children with Haruhi, who was to their knowledge a boy, it was drowned out by their squealing-fangirling about the fact that. They. Wanted. Children. With. Haruhi!)

Haruhi's scholarship mind fought several beats to process all this.

"Idiots," she told the twins when she did, in her way of endearment.

The twins took in Haruhi giving them an uplifting of her lips and a bit of teeth; Haruhi, comfortable, tired and distracted between them.

Exactly at the same glance at brown eyes, dark circles and pale complexion, they knew of the silent pact formed between them.

Whenever Haruhi filled her hands with piles upon piles of books, homework or chores (and in those months, April, May, June, July, whenever meant in any school-free time Haruhi had at her proposal) the twins instantly worked at emptying her hands.

"We told you, you've to put a stop to this," they would say, then plunk down next to her, looks of similarly fake outrage on their faces. "People are starting to talk." 

Haruhi would have her hands full of books or chores or homework. (Today, it was a calculus book.) Thus, she ignored them, perhaps giving them a single glance each.

"You must bear in mind your responsibility to Daiki and Takumi," the twins intoned. (Which had all the effect of Haruhi continuing to ignore them.) They packed an extra whining note to their voices. "You're their imaginary mother, you can't just have an affair with every calculus book you come across." 

Next, Haruhi's hands were empty of anything, the book flung carelessly away by one the twins, somewhere, anywhere, as long as it was out of her reach.

"Time to have some fun," they declared, their grins indicating the level of their self-satisfaction, and started on properly distracting her.

Or:

Wherever the three of them went, they went together. (Even if that meant, more often than not, the twins had to apply their Commoner-kidnap-technique.)

"What? What are they doing?" 

In the sandpit of a playground adjacent to the rosebushes of some posh café, more or less hidden behind some rosebushes, something very large, very orange and very fuzzy stomped its feet. "I still can't see a frigging thing." 

The average number of children to be found in a playground, deposited there by their parents sitting in the café, were staring at something large, orange and fuzzy.

Their mouths slightly agape, their eyes widened, any game, sliding, swinging halted midway, they crowded around orange.

The upper half of fuzzy shifted, twitched. "They're talking." 

"Geez, thanks, I'd never have figured," replied the middle half of large to the children's amazement, "I want to know about what." 

"Well, duh," a muffled voice from above shot back, "Kyouya called this 'a business meeting in regards to Haruhi's still remaining debt'." 

"Kyouya also calls his diary-thingy a notebook. Business meeting might be Kyouya-speak for date." 

The lower half bounced slightly up, down again, to which the upper one reacted by jerking along involuntarily. A part of orange and fuzzy rode up to reveal a tangle of limbs underneath.

"Hikaru! Stop moving around down there. They're only talking. It's boring." 

"What?! I want to see, too!" There were several beats of shifting, toppling, readjusting, insults and complaints on both parts.

"Just stay put," the upper half insisted. His reward was a grumble and, "How come you're on top, anyway?" 

The children watched as orange and fuzzy moved one of its awkward paws and boxed himself into his stomach.

"Hey!" the stomach exclaimed, "I'm older than you by two full minutes. In our act I'm on top too. What does that tell you?" 

The paw poked the stomach again. "That you drew the shorter straw. And that you're a sore loser." 

Another bout of shifting and toppling ensued.

The children watched, wide-eyed.

Suddenly, hands shot out of the stomach of orange, a head, red hair sticking up in all odd places, following.

One child clung to his ball, another swivelled, a third readied herself to throw her trustworthy bucket at whatever was emerging there.

All stared.

The head turned left, right, left, a crack underlining each motion. Afterwards, it turned further, sticking out from folds of orange fur as if there was no body of its own attached to the head.

Amber eyes looked at the children.

The children looked back.

The eyes winked.

The child with the bucket squealed, threw his bucket, which missed by several inches.

"Charmed to meet you, too. Brats," the head drawled and stared at the children staring up at him,

"What? Kaoru, these brats are staring as if they had never seen two guys disguising in a self-made large, orange and fuzzy cat costume to better spy on Mr. Closet Sensitive and the mother of their imaginary children." 

A ball was dropped, a nose snivelled, a squeal squealed. The upper half of the cat sighed.

With another mutter of 'Brats', Hikaru turned further, readjusted the weight of his brother on his shoulders, and started on willing the rosebushes to become see through. (Or at least less thorny.)

When he had finally shifted so much he was at a better angle to catch a glimpse of the back of a brown-haired head and the profile of a pale masculine face, Kaoru threatened to fall off his twin's shoulders if he moved so much as his pinky further to the left.

After several glimpses, Hikaru declared: "Oh. Well. They're talking. That's really boring." 

The head of the cat costume put an effort into glaring at his lower half. (It was ruined by the see-through button eyes. And the whiskers.)

"I don't understand why we can't just go there and grab her," Hikaru went on, fully aware of his twin's ineffectual glare.

There was more shifting, turning and then Kaoru managed the acrobatic high performance to bring his head next to his own legs and left to Hikaru's right shoulder and ear.

"I told you before we can't," the younger twin whispered right into his brother's ear, to put enough emphasis on his words to get them through Hikaru's stubborn head. "If we kidnap her now, Kyouya will just insist on discussing her debt later." 

"We could kidnap her later too- Wait," Hikaru's ear was pressed into Kaoru's cheek, his shoulders dug into his twin's calves as he made a bounce forwards, nearly right into the rosebushes. "They've stopped talking, are standing up." 

"What?" Kaoru tried to perform his second acrobatic miracle for the day. (He succeeded in making the whole cat costume, his twin inclusive, swaying dangerously in place.)

"Let me up! I can't see a thing!" 

Hikaru leaned his head further out the costume, adding to his brother's swaying. "They're standing up. Kyouya's talking into his cell phone…" 

"What's going on?" Kaoru asked while struggling to right himself somehow. Hikaru went on without pause, "…Kyouya's…. leaving… Yes, leaving. And Haruhi's…" 

Kaoru struggled. "What? What?" 

"Haruhi's… She's… She is. Oh." 

Kaoru leaned forward, having finally succeeded in his struggling, the moment Hikaru took a staggering step backwards.

It wasn't clear what made swaying turn into falling, but fact was, suddenly there was less of large, orange and fuzzy and a lot more of sandpit sand.

"Ouch," Kaoru declared around a few mouthful of sand, half his face still covered by the costume head. (He couldn't be entirely sure yet as to which limbs in the tangle of sand, fur and twin were his.)

Hikaru shook his head, encountered a leg of his twin to the right, a hand to the left and discovered the ringing in his ears had nothing to do with his cell phone but everything with the impact from the fall. "Kaoru? You alright?" He groaned. "Haruhi's-" 

"-standing right next to you," a voice declared ceremonially and there stood Haruhi, right next to them.

"Hikaru?" Kaoru fought the costume head off his face, inch by inch, until it came off-

"Funny, for a moment there I thought I had heard-" –and he saw.

Kaoru looked at Haruhi in her stainless, plain outfit looking at them covered in sand, limbs and orange tuff, their red hair sticking up in every physically impossible direction.

He squeaked. (Very manly, he'll have you know.)

Hikaru blushed. (Also very manly.)

Haruhi snorted. (Not at all girl-like.)

"Er," Hikaru stuttered and Kaoru added helpfully, "Uh." 

"Mhm," Haruhi remarked.

"Er," Hikaru stuttered on eloquently, while ducking his head unconsciously behind his brother's leg, "Er, why, Haruhi, isn't it a nice sunny day for…" 

"…laying in the sand of a… sandpit," Kaoru added even more helpfully, "…covered in warm, fuzzy fur." 

"Mhm," Haruhi remarked further, leaned down to brush the worst of the sand of their bodies,

"If the crying children running from the playground to their parents screaming about nasty giant orange cat mutants weren't a dead give-away…" Haruhi levelled a look at the twins.

(Here, Kaoru just about caught his brother muttering "Brats." to his shin.

Hikaru distinctively caught the message of his brother ramming his elbow into his side.)

"…what made you think I wouldn't notice a nasty giant orange cat mutant lurking behind me in the rosebushes?" 

"Er…" The twins took a moment to gather the other's state of mind by taking a look at mildly irritated Haruhi hovering above them.

"We plead momentarily spontaneous convenient loss of short-term memory?" they stated in unison, their voices wavering so badly at the end, their intonation turned the words into a question.

Haruhi dropped a disapproving frown on their tangle of limbs. "We only talked about my debt. And university scholarships. You'd have been bored." 

She stood straight again. (Miraculously, she had accumulated more sand on her clothes and hair than she had brushed off the twins.) "Next time, just ask if you want to come along. Even if I think you'd have been bored." 

With that, she turned, started to walk away.

As they went everywhere together, the twins jumped to their feet (with doubtful success) and, a costume head clutched in one's hand, orange tuff in the other's, the upper and lower half of a nasty large, orange and fuzzy giant mutant cat went after a girl.

Or:

Whatever trick, whichever scheme the twins had at their proposal, they applied to Haruhi.

"My cute daughter," her father called from their entrance area, his tone anything but pleased, yet very polite. "The devil brats are here. Again. Joy, pleasure is all yours." 

Haruhi would really never have guessed, what with the two red-haired catastrophe scenarios wreaking havoc in her room.

They had torn in, let out a tornado of comments about how her sense of style applied to interior design as well and thrown themselves in true tornado style onto her bed (and, completely by incident of course, onto her.).

She hadn't even blinked at the extra weight of several added appendages to her body.

She had simply ducked her head farther into her pillow, prayed that no dual earthquake would shake up her concentration (or destroy her bed) and had kept her eyes focused on the university information brochure in her hands.

Until that is, one earthquake shook the brochure right out of her hands. The aftershock followed right away with a chirp of: "We found your cell phone!" 

"You mean Kaoru stole it out of my schoolbag when he put my bento box in," Haruhi corrected and took up another brochure (which she seemed to have an infinite supply of) from her nightstand. (This brochure was lost in a twin avalanche.)

"Nah, we found it," they declared, their grins speaking of another catastrophe waiting to happen. They brandished her cell phone at her like a stroke of lightning. "And we improved it." 

Haruhi scrutinized the cell phone, which looked exactly like hers, down to the little scratch on the screen surface. Thus, she deducted it was indeed hers.

Satisfied with her conclusion (and suffering from pathological incuriosity) Haruhi didn't bother to interrogate them further.

Rather, she evacuated her cell phone and brochures from their hands to her nightstand.

And not a catastrophe prevention measure too soon, because the next second the tides of two grinning twin Tsunamis washed her out of her room, past her father, out of the flat and into the warm rays of sun on a warm day in June.

And:

However they pulled it off, they weren't even sure themselves.

"No, tono," Hikaru explained and it was difficult to tell what he was enjoying more, telling this to Tamaki or licking melon juice off his own fingers while he was at it, "You can't speak to her." 

Kaoru snickered into his piece of melon. He took one step, two, closer to his brother in the entrance area of the Fujioka household. (They had slouched there from the living room, where they had mainly been eating water melon and as a more delicious side dish keeping Haruhi from doing her homework when Hikaru's cell phone had rung.)

"We didn't steal her cell phone. What an absurd accusation," Hikaru stated languidly into the cell phone (he was definitely enjoying the talking part more.), "We merely found it." 

Kaoru snickered. "Yep, we found it," he took up for his brother while he leaned his head on Hikaru's shoulder and closer to the phone, "And incidentally, set up a call diversion on her cell phone to Hikaru's when a certain king-pervert tries to call her." 

An alarming stream of words, increasingly of the French language, erupted in full Tamaki-volume from the phone.

(The twins didn't understand a word from that point on. Nevertheless, the intonation and the reference to red hair and witch burnings they caught, more than got Tamaki's meaning across.)

Sometime between a shout of what the twins thought meant 'bunch of flowers' (or at least a bunch of something) in French and one, two or five more of one twin's sarcastic comments and the other's applauding snickers, a door was opened and closed.

The number of people in the entrance area advanced to three.

Instantly, all comments and snickers stopped. (The French went on, a loud, steady stream of unintelligible words and shrill sounds.)

Heavily made-up eyelashes were batted, high heels presented in full menacing three inch height.

The twins gulped.

"Was nice talking to you, tono," Hikaru said as if meant it and Kaoru, never taking his eyes of those high heels, joined in, "Until you try to call Haruhi again." 

Hikaru hung up.

The twins gulped a second time.

"I don't like you," Ranka told them, no malicious intent colouring his words.

Like they had done for years, the twins entwined hands, fingers, skin, stood so close to each other their two bodies molded into one breach-less front of We against All The Others.

Only, unlike for all those years, pressed body to body, they discovered a breach in their molding. (It was as large as a lack of a body between them. A smaller frame, fingers more calloused than theirs, almost rough to the touch, filling the breach, anchoring them to each other.)

"What is it?" Hikaru snapped, because Haruhi's father couldn't tell them apart anyway, because it didn't matter, because he was made insecure by a breach.

Ranka raised a perfectly curved eyebrow at the boy, handed them an envelope.

Not snapping, Kaoru took the envelope, because Ranka was Haruhi's father, because it didn't matter, because he was made just as insecure by the breach as his twin even though he had known of it longer.

It was a white envelope, unassuming, the example of a completely ordinary envelope.

Its contents though, were not ordinary at all, at least not to the two boys peering inside the envelope.

"Haruhi has never been less focused on her goals," Ranka stated while examining his faultlessly manicured fingernails. He gave them a half-lidded glance. "She has also never smiled this much." 

A breach was felt, almost painfully.

Lips were drawn into a smile, almost kind.

"I'll be away from August to the first of September," Ranka informed them, smiling. "Be sure to keep her unfocused enough she remembers to have some fun." 

The twins thought about nodding. (Their heads followed their thought up in the awkward imitation of a motion.)

"Good," Ranka said, "Oh, and keep the touching to a minimum." 

A door was opened, closed.

The population shrank to two.

Hikaru glanced at Kaoru, at the contents of the envelope just like his twin was doing.

"He likes us," one remarked.

"He loves us," the other remarked.

They shared a grin, the breach in their front not feeling as large as long as both of them were holding unto the envelope.

Inside the white paper folds, metallic, battered and sacred, was resting the spare key to the Fujioka household. 

Days passed in fleeting glances (from red to brown to red), lingering touches (skin on skin on skin) a bothersome duty to school (test; marks; boredom) and a self-appointed duty to filling their breach (defocusing and coaxing and distracting).

At the end of July, which put a temporary stop (also called school vacations) to their bothersome duty to school, the twins turned something sacred.

"Haru-hiiii," they called out, stepping into the flat, heavy luggage at their feet, "We're home!" 

Haruhi poked her head out of the kitchen, the smell of freshly chopped vegetables and frying oil wafting around her head in a crown.

Once more, she proved her scholarship worthiness when it merely took her three glances to assess that:

a) Yes, the twins were standing in her doorway. (And looking awfully cheerful, at that.)

b) No, she hadn't opened the door for them.

c) Said door looked guiltily intact. (This either meant they had stolen the spare key in one of their frequent visits, or her father had given it to them.)

d) Either way, considering the bulk of their luggage looming against the intact door, they were intending to stay. (For a really, really long time, even keeping in mind that half of it would probably be contents to play Fashion doll with her.)

Processing all this, Haruhi quickly calculated the likelihood of them resisting her attempts to make them leave by mentally measuring the wideness of the grins splitting the twins' faces in half.

She sighed.

"I'll chop some more vegetables," she told half their faces. "You take out the trash." 

The widening of their grin threatened to make the twins lose the upper half of their faces.

That way, their vacations started over insisting smiles and a trash can.


	4. Folding Out

Disclaimer: Ouran is not mine.

Author's note: Continuation of last chapter. I feel you can only understand everything I wanted to convey if you see those two chapters as a whole. Besides, that way, there is way more uh… can I call that fluffiness? I think… not.

Again with the worshipping for Verita dea.

**Chapter Four**

Every single second of every minute of every hour of every day in August was hot.

It was hot when the sun fired the interior of the flat, when clouds covered the sky with sheer mass, when rain made a drizzly attempt at being wet, it was hot, period.

They (Hikaru, Haruhi, Kaoru) kept the windows of the flat wide open, all the time, their clothes sticking to them in a second sweaty skin and they spent hours worshipping the table fan. (Until it overheated from overuse.)

They spent their time doing nothing.

Day after day, they stretched lazily on the floor of the living room, Haruhi with a book or brochure or notes she steadfastly refused to part with, the twins with a game or food or a blank-faced Haruhi they refused to release.

Most often though, the twins were too hot to do anything but wind themselves around Haruhi in a tight coil and suck pieces of fruit dry of juice, sweet-sticky stains dripping on Haruhi's clothes.

So, the twins spent their times doing nothing, really, and it was new and glorious to them (and the twins had never been less bored).

"You don't have to stay," Haruhi told them continuously on the hottest days on which no amount of twin-supplied hairspray could force her sweat-damp hair into a hairdo the twins approved of.

"Nah," Hikaru answered every time, softly dribbling juice stains on her white shirt, "We're too fond of your floor." 

"Yup," Hikaru agreed each time, his fruit juice-sticky fingers gliding along her damp-dry cheeks, "Most comfortable cold, hard floor there is." 

Like always before, they ended up sharing cake slices of various burn degrees. (The improved results of Haruhi's visits to Hunny and Mori.)

The taste of burned coal and sweet fruit mixed into something awful on their tongue. (The twins loved tasting every grain of ash, every drop of juice.)

They fidgeted, they squirmed, they sweated, together.

When the weather got all too oppressive in the small flat, they escaped to a park nearby. (To a tree the twins had claimed as their property the first time the three of them had wandered around the park nearby the flat, aimlessly.

It was a sturdy tree, middle-sized, a willow, its leaves elongate, soft and crawling with insects of all kind.)

And, as it was too oppressive that day, the tree was where they could be found.

(About them, right then:

Haruhi had her back to the trunk of the tree. Class notes were resting in her hands with the same naturalness the twins' heads were resting in her lap.

Hikaru had his eyes open as wide as his twin's were closed. He was staring up-up-upwards at every stretch of sky flashing between the thick treetop-web of light green willow leaves. At the same time, he was covering as much of the bodies next to him with his limbs as physically possible.

Kaoru was drawn into himself, taking up as less space as humanly possible, the feeling for his own body lost in the heat of the bodies next to his.

He smelt freshly mowed grass, sweat and Haruhi, the left-over taste of something awful on the tip of his tongue.

The comfortable expectations of absolutely nothing made their bodies relaxed, slack, boneless against each other.

"Hey, look," Hikaru said, slightly hyper from all the relaxation and gestured at a vague point upwards, "That cloud looks exactly like tono in ranting mode." 

Haruhi swept her eyes up in courteous motion, went back to reading.

Kaoru reluctantly opened heavy-lidded eyes, lost himself some more in the bodies next to his.

"Hikaru," he said, voice deep and throaty from being immersed in his two worlds,

"Everybody knows every cloud looks like a chicken." 

Hikaru thrust his arms into the air in quick stabbing motions, mock hurt on his face. "Do not. That cloud is a tono." 

"Do too," Kaoru claimed and snickered into Haruhi's short pants, "'sides if you see tono in every cloud, you know you got major issues." 

Hikaru blew a leaf from his face. "Not every cloud. Just that one. Oh, and that one to the left." 

"Issues." 

The twins glared at each other.

Thus, the fourth major tug-a-twin war of the day ensued. (To Haruhi's great delight, she had, again, the honour of supplying the tugging battle grounds.)

After several bouts of tugging, more snickering and having had to rescue her notes from assassination attempts, four in all, two by each twin, Haruhi felt compelled to speak up.

"I'm trying to get some learning down here." 

Her words had in so much the desired effect (peace and quiet) as the twins stopped their war game of who could pull the most of Haruhi in one direction in a tug. (And that's about as much effect as she got.)

"You're always learning," Hikaru whined, a note of accusation in his voice and Kaoru contributed,

"If we didn't keep putting you to bed every time you fell asleep in the middle of learning, print letters would be forever imprinted on your face." 

"And the brochures," Hikaru went on, definitely on an accusation-making-rampage, "What's up with those?" 

Haruhi pressed the notes to herself like a long absent lover. "It's called being concerned about your future," she said, a note of no-nonsense in her tone to oppose Hikaru's accusations.

"Choosing the right university is essential. For you too." 

The twins shrugged simultaneously, their bones grinding into her sweaty skin. "We don't have to deal with that. We're going to apply to one university only." 

She blinked, face drawing a blank. "One university?" 

The twins made a confirming sound in the back of their throat, gleefully claiming their space on her lap again. "Bunka Fashion College," they chirped, "The very same one mom went to. And like, every Hitachiin before her." 

Haruhi stared at their grinning faces staring up at her from her lap. "But what if you fail the entrance exam?" 

"We're Hitachiins," they said as if reciting poetry, as if that sentence was self-explanatory.

Her face remained blank.

Feeling strangely satisfied with her obliviousness, they coiled themselves around her in a sigh, pressed her farther into the soft grass, against the solid bark of the tree.

"Even if we weren't such talented genii at fashion design, not letting us pass would be like exempting their style Messiah.

Haruhi acquired not quite an expression. "Mhm," she said.

Wind picked up, swept over the parts of their skin not covered in clothes or each other's limbs.

Someone released a sigh, throaty, deep, at the barely noticeable chill the breeze brought to their heated skin, another started to draw fingertip-circles along skin not his own, the third one took up notes, started reading again.

Into the almost silence of breathing and sighing and paper-shuffling and wind rustling through leaves, between not quite touching and definitely sweating, right into their shared comfortableness, Hikaru shot a question.

"Haruhi," he said, his words bullets tearing through their expectations of absolutely nothing,

"Do you like one of us better?" 

The girl went rigid, still, cold.

"No, I don't," she replied bluntly and directly. So utter Haruhi-like was this action, Kaoru, bearing the brunt of the bullets Hikaru killed their comfortableness with, plastered her limbs around his as if she were a band-aid.

Ducking his head, Hikaru looked like he had just discovered a gun in his hands. He grumbled something, went silent.

Then, he sank into Haruhi as well; his movements jerky and nearly harsh. His hand brushed his brother's in a peace offering.

Kaoru took it, entwined their hands.

Haruhi, sandwiched between them, relaxed.

Hikaru didn't bring up the subject for a second time, and the twins never mentioned it among them.

Until that is, the night they did.

"Hikaru?" Kaoru asked into the dark, voice a breath, and pushed the thin blankets further away across the floor, away from his over-heated body.

"Why'd you ask something like that?" (He suspected, of course, but needed to hear it from his brother.)

The darkness shifted, was silent for two breaths ghosting across Kaoru's cheeks.

"Don't you…" 

One more breath, a gathering of words.

"Don't you want to know which differences she makes between us?" 

Kaoru felt aware of the hard floor beneath him, of the tatami mat imprinting itself into his flesh, felt aware of his own body.

"No," he replied, "Not really." 

They each fell into a silence of their own after that.

Kaoru fell asleep that night, thinking about turning his back to his brother. 

One day of their vacation at the grand Fujioka resort the twins spent having a pleasant chat with Kyouya.

(It went just about like this:

"Hikaru, Kaoru," Kyouya said by way of greeting. (He seemed generally unsurprised to see them answering the door of the Fujioka household.)

"Kyouya," the twins replied easily enough and made a show of leaning against the doorframe as if belonging there, while continuing to suck on melon pieces Haruhi had sliced for them,

"How's your diary-thingy hanging? Full of angst and drama?" (The twins weren't surprised in the least Kyouya wasn't surprised.)

Kyouya fake-smiled at them.

The twins imitated a grin and stepped back to let him in.

From there on, it all went downhill.)

When Haruhi came home, hands packed with grocery bags, (the twins were supposed to tidy up the flat in her absence. Note the supposed to.), she stumbled upon collateral damage.

"I can't help it. It's like we're stuck," Hikaru was saying when she entered the kitchen to pack away the groceries, "It just makes me so mad." 

"Speaking of mad," Haruhi said as she started on stowing the vegetables, then the cans of tinned food.

(The twins stilled at the sound of her voice. When they turned to her they encountered an unfamiliar feeling children caught with their hands in the cookie jar were more familiar to.)

"You… used a bit," Haruhi paused, shook her head, continued speaking, "well, no, a lot more water than you need to scrub the floor." 

Brown eyes were fixed on the twins, who shifted from foot to foot. "And generally you hover carpet. You don't drown it." 

"Er," Hikaru said the moment Kaoru put forward an, "Uh…" 

"We kinda…" they gestured with their hands as if fishing for words in the air, "…had a water fight with Kyouya?" 

Haruhi put the last of her grocery shopping, fixed brown eyes on them for a second time.

"And what did he want?" 

"A pen for his -"Hikaru started to mutter. He was only stopped by the insertion of his twin's elbows to his ribs.

"He said for you to call him about your debt," Kaoru said over his twin's cry of mostly exaggerated pain.

Haruhi mhm'ed at them.

The twins fidgeted around before they burst out, "We'd have won if he hadn't cheated!" 

She rubbed the bridge of her nose and wondered not for the first time just what her father had been thinking when he had handed their spare key to the twins. (Or if he had been thinking _at all.)_

"Really, he cheated," they cried, pouts on their lips and she suspected them to be one petulant frown away from stomping their feet. "Calling your bodyguards to help you counts as cheating." 

"Yes, I guess bodyguards would explain the foot-sized dent in our front door," she shook her head, stopped rubbing, gave a sound like a sigh, "I'll fix us something for supper." 

With that, she vanished out of the kitchen.

"See?" Kaoru whispered into his brother's ears. "We've no reason to be mad. Or jealous. And we'll pay for the dent." 

Hikaru brushed his fingers along his brother's, almost tentatively. "I just can't help it," he breathed, but a grin, mirroring Kaoru's, was on his lips.

Their self-satisfied expressions only wavered when Haruhi came back into the kitchen, smiled at them beatifically and handed each of them a bucket and a swab. 

They were awfully lazy, they did absolutely nothing, they were utterly content.

Yet, by the end of August (also called the nearing end of their school vacations) expectations of something caught up with them.

The twins, heavy luggage at their feet for the servants to pack away, wore memories of brown eyes, sweat-slicked touches and cold hard floor like clothes.

Their mother, standing on the stairway a few feet away from them, knew that it had never done any good criticizing her sons' impeccable sense of style.

Instead, she had dressed herself in her latest designed fashion, a smile caught between grin and frown and a tang of motherly concern.

"I was starting to think you had permanently emigrated to the Fujiokas," she greeted her sons.

In response, she got a dual chirped "Hi, mom," and all the grand social interaction of being allowed to watch her sons walk past her.

"A business associate of mine saw you while going for a jog," she informed their retreating backs.

"In a park. Willow ring a bell?" 

She was rewarded by her sons' simultaneous backward glances.

"He saw you with a girl." They stared at her so innocently, their faces taking on such cherub-like qualities, she just knew something was up.

"One girl," she stressed, drawing her motherly concern with new resolve around herself, "As in one girl for the both of you." 

Her sons exchanged barely a look, turned to her nonchalantly. (Which already told her all she needed to know.)

"It's Haruhi," they said, their tone of voice wavering between strangely calm and quite expectedly petulant.

"Oh," their mother said, her lips transforming into a single white line, "Well," she shrugged, "Okay then." 

For the first time in all their lives the twins were even thrown off track by their mother's behaviour.

"You're taking this surprisingly well," Kaoru ventured forward cautiously, his fingers winding with his twin's.

"Yeah," Hikaru advanced carelessly, his fingers drilling into his twin's flesh roughly,

"Where's all the drama and disowning?" 

Their mother glanced at them and even after eighteen years she had absolutely no idea who of her sons was who. "I most certainly don't approve of this. But, well…" she shrugged again, "It's Haruhi." 

She wouldn't even have had time to put the first stitch of the round on a pin, before there were arms around her, crushing, hugging.

"Really," she said when there was enough oxygen in her lungs again to speak, "What did you expect me to say?" 

The arms crushed a bit harder, putting wrinkles all over her dress. She didn't care one bit.

"After all, we aren't some stuffy old-fashioned business, like say the Ootoris." 

Two more tightenings of their grips, and they released her.

She looked up at them, into amber eyes. "Hikaru, Kaoru," (She glanced at the wrong twin when she said the names. They didn't bother to correct her.) "You were always different from the other children. One girl's more than I ever expected you'd be satisfied with." 

Her sons looked back, down the stairs, into eyes of a colour a tad lighter than theirs. "You," they declared ceremonially, "are one wicked mom." 

The twinkle in her eyes was frighteningly similar to the twins' grins. "It was mostly a selfish decision," she patted their heads in the way they hated so, "The girl doesn't fall for your oh-so-handsome looks. Or put up with your antics." 

Her laugh sounded suspiciously more like a snicker. "She's good for you." 

They released her, cheeks painted a darker colour than usual. "Whatever. We're going into our room," they muttered and started up the stairs.

"Don't screw this up, you hear me?" she called after their retreating backs.

"Yeah, yeah," they muttered without turning back and vanished into the corridor leading to their room.

Their mother was left standing there, on the stairs, for a few more moments, her lips playing with a grin, concern drawn around her in an even tighter fit. 

September and October were a string of loosely linked day. Everything they did in school was noted, asserted and graded.

(This pushed the three of them into an even tighter connection.

When Haruhi turned to the left, there was Hikaru.

When Haruhi turned to the right, there was Kaoru.

When the twins turned to her, left and right, there Haruhi was, in-between them.)

On one such loose day, Haruhi got silence.

Immediately suspicious, she stopped working on her Japanese drama essay, turned right, left.

Neither twin looked up from the ominous brochures they pretended to be immersed in.

Stuck between the two, Haruhi cocked her head at them.

"Sh," they admonished her haughtily, never taking their eyes off the brochures, "It's called being concerned about your future.

Haruhi cocked her head so far to the side she almost touched the surface of the library table they were sitting at.

Noting that the brochures appeared to have too many pages to be university brochures, she left it at that and concentrated on her assignment again.

Or would have concentrated, if she hadn't felt the nape of her neck crawling with their smiles.

Slightly irritated (more by the general level of stress she was experiencing these months than by them), Haruhi stated without ever stopping to think about it:

"Hikaru, freeze your hand right there. No, Kaoru, you can't have my pen. Both of you, stop grinning. I'm serious, I've to get this done." 

The twins gaped at her not looking at them. (Hikaru's hand was hovering a few inches above her waist, Kaoru's fingers were an incidental brush away from her pen.)

'Did she just-?' Hikaru mouthed to his brother who gave a silent 'I think so.' in a vague shake of his head.

'No silent talk,' Haruhi admonished them casually, with merely a scrunching up of her nose.

Disregarding all her warnings (Most of the time Haruhi looked about as threatening as a kitten anyway.) the twins dropped their brochures, tangled their fingers in her hair, partly to try out some complicated hairdo, mainly just because they could.

"You know us too well," they said, even though they knew they didn't have to speak, even though there was no genuine meaning behind what they were saying, "Where's the fun in that?" 

In contrast to their words, Kaoru and Hikaru let their fingers gracing her skin in all those touches not necessary to style her hair tell Haruhi something with meaning.

Haruhi, caught up in assignment question number two and ink on paper, didn't hear. 

In the middle of October, Haruhi oddly enough discovered being in the middle wasn't the worst place to be.

It was a particular loose day, the sky clouded, and she was sitting through a parent/student/teacher discussion about the subject of a suitable university for her in her class teacher's office.

(On the subject of her teacher:

He was a fifty-something year old man, who was as thin as a ruler.

His expressions had been drawn fleshless from years of teaching, his eyes had sunken so deep into their sockets that when he looked at his students, he didn't see faces but prestigious last names and varying degrees of talent and potential. )

"Fujioka Haruhi," the teacher was saying, his sockets for eyes fixed on the documents papers on his writing desk, "Scholarship student, has ranked second best of her class two terms in succession now." 

Ranka, for once dressed in a suit and the name of Ryoji, made every effort to look like the model suit and birth name wearing parent.

At his side, Haruhi, looked like the model scholarship student without particularly trying to.

"Especially talented at English," the teacher stated, saw potential and the fleshless lines he had for lips stretched into a smile. "There're two universities in particular that-" 

"No," Haruhi cut him off, her voice made of determination. "I'd be more interested in Law." 

Ranka shifted in his suit and a name from a lifetime ago. "But Haruhi-," he tried.

"No," Haruhi said, lines of her face so stiff as if set in rigor mortis. "A lawyer. I'll be a lawyer." 

Ranka shifted.

The teacher stared through her.

"Well," he said and tried on another fleshless expression. "Well. With your marks, Law would certainly be a promising alternative. Just remember, the choice of university is important for your future." 

On impulse, Haruhi turned right, turned left, fully expecting to find bored expressions turning to her.

There was no boredom, no expressions. No one who turned back.

Haruhi started. Her face slackened, her determined expression fell apart.

The teacher droned on, about universities and talent and futures.

And Haruhi, Haruhi pulled her face together, all stiff and determined and Rigor Mortis and started to listen. 

That evening at supper, Haruhi refused to take a second rice ball.

Her father, comfortably seated at the living room table in a smear of lipstick and the name

Ranka, was chewing on his fourth.

"You realize," he said, lipstick-smeared lips tossing grains everywhere along with his words,

"wanting something doesn't make you less of a person." 

She answered with barely a look, neither turning right nor left, and a noncommittal sound.

For the rest of supper, the second rice ball remained on the plated, unwanted. 

During November and December days covered them in quiet and restlessness like snowflakes did with the ground outside.

"I hate this, Hikaru muttered not quiet at all, his fingers beating up a restless drum against the surface of the mahogany table he was sitting at.

Kaoru knew exactly what his twin was referring to. There was no need for him to look four tables to their right. (At Haruhi talking blank-faced to a not quite polite Kyouya.)

(This time, the twins had asked to come along on Haruhi's debt discussion chat with Kyouya.

After three times of performing the amazing glasses disappearing from Kyouya's nose appearing in the cake buffet, they had been banned to another table of the café.

Far, far away from a less than happy Kyouya, specks of whipped cream still sticking to the lenses of his glasses here and there like a threat.)

Kaoru slipped his hands quietly over his twin's.

Hikaru quickened his beat, the muscles of his arms clenched.

"Don't," Kaoru whispered.

The beat died. Hikaru stood up, shoving his brother's hands off in the process.

"I'm going outside," he stated, stalked off.

Kaoru did what he had done for years, an action so natural it had never required any thought

on his part. (Twin follows twin.)

Kaoru followed Hikaru.

It was snowing outside, thick, white pieces of cotton-like flakes.

Somehow, the snowflakes raining down on like punches, biting into his skin with ice-cold teeth, served to make Hikaru even angrier.

Snow crushed under his heels with every step, his cashmere pullover was laughable inappropriate for the weather and everything around him was covered in white-cold calm.

Hikaru cursed.

It didn't help.

He stomped his feet, was snowed on, shivered.

But he didn't have to do it alone, because there was his twin, shivering along with him.

Hikaru drew closer to his brother as if Kaoru were an oversized heater.

"I told you," he mumbled, both shivered. "I can't help it." 

Kaoru shivered so hard it might just have been a shrug. "Hey, no matter. Where else do I get the pleasure of losing valuable parts of my anatomy to frostbite?" 

Hikaru's chuckle was more of a sneeze. "You-" 

"-Forgot your coat inside," a voice, quiet, even, with just a hint of a shiver finished for him.

The twins, right and left, turned and there stood Haruhi, wrapped in thick layers of mismatched clothes, holding out their overcoats to them in a promise of warmth.

"Kyouya had to take care of something or another. He's already left. We talked more about scholarships than my debt, anyway." Haruhi shook their coats at them. "Now, take this before you get a cold. Or frostbite." 

They were on her like ravenous wolves.

Hands pawed her close; frozen mouths nuzzled her throat, their breath mingled in clouds.

As one, they the twins shrugged on their coats, the girl over their shoulders.

"Haru-hiiiii," they whined into her ears, in that tone that told it her they would be demanding something of her, "Let's build a snowman!" 

Later, when their fingers were stiff, their bodies numb and their cheeks red, Kaoru leaned into Hikaru.

"See, it's fine," he whispered quietly to his restless brother, "She followed us. Again." 

Haruhi looked up then, from where she had been working on the head of their snowman. (It had turned out to be more of a snow… mutant something. Neither of them cared.)

The lower part of her face was hidden mostly by a blue wool scarf, her nose was a glowing red and constantly running, melting ice crystals wetted her hair into spikes.

She looked as plain as ever.

Hikaru had never wanted her more to be part of their world than in that moment.

"Yeah," he muttered to his brother, buried ice-chip-cold hands into his pockets, "It's just fine." 

At supper that evening in the Fujioka household, Haruhi (the twins had, under protest, long since scattered off to their home) put a smile on her face and a second rice ball on her father's plate.

"There might be a compromise," she told him and took a bite of her own, first rice ball.

All throughout January Haruhi lived on the pages of her schoolbooks, a lack of sleep, and raw worn determination.

The only moments something got her full attention was when she picked up her pen to write a test or to apply for a scholarship or to take a university entrance exam or to learn, learn, learn.

The twins, on the other hand, died of the sudden shock of having to get actual studying done, of having to take a single entrance exam and of utter Haruhi deprived boredom.

So, merely to prevent their impending deaths of pathological laziness of course, the twins lived to haul off Haruhi any opportunity they got to anywhere, least it was far from school, tests and boredom.

Only, this opportunity, they were still in need of the hostage to their hostage-taking.

For over fifteen minutes, they had been lurking outside the school gates now (and that was fourteen minutes and fifty-nine seconds more than their general attention-to-boredom span), and Hikaru was starting to become restless, Kaoru quiet.

"Perhaps she finished her test earlier. Wouldn't be the first time," Hikaru said as if trying to taste of the words on his tongue. He grimaced. "Right?" 

Kaoru didn't think Haruhi had finished earlier. What he said was:

"Right." 

Made insecure by Kaoru's easy affirmation and the complex expression on his twin's face, Hikaru filled his uncertainty with words.

"Perhaps someone asked her to help with his studying," he rambled on, tried to make the words fit. "Or perhaps, perhaps, I don't know." 

Kaoru heard the implication of anger simmering beneath his twin's confusion.

"She didn't forget us." Kaoru cast his eyes to the floor. "We didn't tell her we would be here." 

Hikaru tried to rearrange his features, maybe intended to go for a grin. It came out as an awkward grimace.

"Right," he said, "Right." 

It was another eight minutes (of shifting, waiting, rambling, anger quietly simmering) until Haruhi came through the gate, all hurry and flushed face.

"Oh," she exclaimed upon spotting them, purposefully unsurprised. (It wasn't as if she hadn't come to expect to their unexpected hostage-takings, after all.). "I don't have time to play hostage now. Kyouya hold me up too long already. I've to hurry to catch my train." 

"Take the next one," Kaoru chirped, voice oddly wavering when his twin failed to join in. He anchored Haruhi to him in a hug. "So, what about Kyouya?" 

Next to his twin, Hikaru had stopped waiting, shifting, had stopped rambling, had, in fact, stopped anything altogether.

Kaoru could distinctively feel something start to boil.

Haruhi, too preoccupied with searching her way out of Kaoru's embrace, too ignorant, too oblivious to this particular feeling, didn't.

Instead, she levelled a look at Kaoru, eyes round, face still flushed. "I met him in the hallway after my test, we talked. And no, I didn't even ask why he was there in the first place, "she stated, blank-faced, squirmed against Kaoru's embrace. "That's all. Interrogation finished, now?" 

There was a pause, so short it didn't even last a whole glance, in which the twins scrutinized her in half a glance.

Her hair was in dire need of another cut, her tie was hold together more by pretence than knot and there, against the corners of her mouth, a few tiny crumbles were resting.

It might have been any kind of crumbles, sandwich, croissant, cookie crumbles.

To Hikaru though, they were crumbles of burned coal, a confession of a cake not shared with them, him, but with another, with _Kyouya_.

(It was a completely unreasonable conclusion. But then again, Hikaru wasn't known for being reasonable, didn't want to be reasonable. He had his twin for that.)

In the end, Kaoru believed that was what made Hikaru lean forward, his eyes sizzling, expression on his face boiling over.

"What-" Hikaru fought with himself over words, captured Haruhi's face in his hands. "What do you think we are?" 

('I can't help it.' was what Kaoru heard, and judging by the blankness of Haruhi's face, the hard set of her mouth, she might have as well.)

Hikaru leaned in on her, because he had said something he couldn't, didn't want to take back, because all he could was rush forward, head on.

('I can't help it, I'm sorry, I can't help it,' echoed around Kaoru's head in a hiss of static noise.)

Haruhi didn't budge an inch, because she was Haruhi, self-reliant and unflappable and in a hurry to get her train and oh so oblivious.

(Kaoru remembered a calm voice stating a fact; a promise. 'I. Know. You.')

Without reason, without because, Kaoru suddenly felt very, very lost.

(He felt the mutter of 'It doesn't matter' on the tip of his tongue like a soothing prayer.)

"What do you think we are?" Hikaru demanded again. (He was fully aware he was causing a scene. He also didn't care one bit.)

She stared at him, eyes impossible wide. He fought down the urge to shake her.

"You. I. We," he said, slowly, stressing each syllable, whatever patience he might have pretended to possess long since spent.

She stared.

He cursed. Muttered something that could have been an apology or another curse, turned his back on her.

Then, Hikaru walked off, burning, sizzling, boiling. (Fled, more like.)

"What we're?" Haruhi asked. There was real puzzlement, true bewilderment in her voice. "I don't understand." 

She looked up at Kaoru, so serious, so determined, all the time and never stopping, and he noticed how tiny, frail, she was compared to him.

"We're friends," Haruhi said, firmly, asked, not so firmly: "Right?" 

And Kaoru realized serious, determined Haruhi was just as lost in this as he was.

"Yes," he whispered, "Yes, we're," and brushed lips across her mouth, "And that's where we're more." 

Haruhi blinked, expression caught between firm and frail, this nothing she could be ignorant of, nothing she could be oblivious to.

Kaoru hesitated, brushed a finger along her line of her jaw, as if he had to think about an action that had always come to him without thought before.

(Twin always follows twin.)

Kaoru followed Hikaru.

Haruhi was left behind standing before the school gates of Ouran High School, very determined, very serious and very, very lost. 

For the next few weeks they tip-toed circles around each other, the twins by stealing peaks at her discreetly, Haruhi by openly staring at them in blunt observation.

As days passed, their circles drew narrower. Kaoru (tactfully) pick-pocketed a brush there,

Hikaru (less tactfully) sneaked a touch here, Haruhi (with no tact whatsoever) sometimes turned left, sometimes right, every time to say frank words to them. (The twins avoided listening)

Truth was, aside from play-pretend the twins didn't know how to keep being angry, how to exclude someone that was an integrated part of the triad of their world.

So, when, one day in February, Haruhi sauntered over to Hikaru and Kaoru (and they didn't want to avoid listening any longer) and said, frank as ever: "I've to think about this." the twins agreed easily enough: "You should." 

And Haruhi thought, hard and long, she thought about it with the same fervor she tackled a particular different question in a test with.

When she had considered every angle of the problem, every possible variable, trice, (and still arrived at the same conclusion.), she sat down for supper with her father and announced:

"I think I'm in a relationship with two guys." 

Ranka managed to not choke on his soup.

After that his reaction was dramatically undramatic.

He simply put his spoon and need for an outburst down and said: "The twins, I assume." 

Haruhi made a motion, somewhere between nonchalant nod and helpless shrug.

"They're brats, the both of them," Ranka sighed, twirled a lock of hair-lacked hair round his fingers, "But I suppose it's better than that declaration of love for your calculus book I was expecting any day now." 

He pursed flamingo-pink lips. "For that matter, I think the brats would prefer you to books anytime." 

Haruhi heard the concern in the accumulation of lines around his heavily mascaraed eyes.

"I preferred them to ootoro," she answered in response to his silent question.

Ranka waved perfectly manicured fingers at her, his unspoken question not completely answered.

But there was a smile tempting the corners of his mouth, while he lilted: "That, cute daughter of mine, is what it's like to want someone." 

Haruhi slurped a large spoonful of soup down in a decidedly not cute way. "I wish I had stuck with my calculus book." 

Large hands ruffled through her unruly hair. "I do too," Ranka murmured. "Are you going to tell them?" 

Another slurping of soup disappeared down Haruhi's throat.

"It wouldn't be fair to them." She laid down her spoon, rubbed at her temples. "Or would it?" She sighed. "I need more time to think." 

Ranka smacked his lips together in a clap, tapped fingertips against fingertips in a crunch. His voice though, rang out barely above a murmur (and that was what made his daughter listen so intently).

"Please, Haruhi, just promise to be a good kid and do the selfish thing." 

His daughter cocked her head, considered.

That evening, Haruhi took a second rice ball.

For the rest of February to the beginnings of March, an unspoken understanding build the base of Haruhi's encounters with the twins.

She didn't say anything about what had happened, the twins didn't mention it, all thought about it.

They slipped into an awkward routine, standing close to each other but not that close, looking at each other briefly but not that briefly.

It was awkward. It was uncomfortable. It was safe.

(The twins hated it with a passion, Haruhi was merely put off.)

Then, one day in March, the realization overwhelmed them that not even a week was left till their graduation ceremony.

Haruhi looked always tired in that time, tired and plain and battered like damaged goods and suddenly the twins found it imperative, crucial even, that she spent graduation night with them.

"It'll be great," they told her, sneaking a not so brief glance at her, "You'll see." 

She threw them a brief dubious look.

The twins caught her in an embrace full of gangly limbs and clinging need. (With complete disregard for not that close.)

Trapped in body parts and closeness, she had caved in just a tad more easily than she might have if she hadn't been so preoccupied weighing what was fair and what wasn't.

Hence the reason why, on the night of her graduation, she wasn't mingling with the other graduating students in the warm, brightly lit ballroom.

Rather, she was standing on the rooftop of the west wing. The night sky was clouded, goosebumps were riding rampage on her exposed forearms (the twins had force-persuaded her into a dress) and Haruhi had yet to see anything 'great' about this.

"Well," she remarked, looked round the roof, a grinning twin at either side of her, "It's a roof." 

"Geesh," Hikaru exclaimed, partly irritated, mostly amused, while Kaoru hauled the girl up (he was sure to keep some distance to their touching). "I'd never have guessed. Such a brilliant observation could only be made by this year's top graduate." 

Haruhi rolled her eyes, Hikaru snickered, Kaoru felt light-headed.

The world was good, and if not then their own at least, a good, breach-less, perfect world.

"See," he tittered, drunk on half a glass of champagne and Haruhi's weight against him, "We found you our own cold, hard floor." 

He put her down on a blanket Hikaru had spread on the ground, next to a large picnic basket they had had their kitchen staff prepare in advance.

Sitting there with bended knees atop folds of red-black-checkered fabric, Haruhi, in her blue dress and serious face, looked horribly out of place. Still feeling light-headed, he told her so as Hikaru handed her a glass of cranberry juice.

Haruhi smiled at him, just like that, bluntly, bordering on beautiful.

They sat down next to her, as close as they could without being that close, cranberry juice filled glasses in all their hands.

Someone made a remark about cranberry juice and getting drunk, another snickered, the third one grumbled something.

This came easy to them, this banter, and they felt almost more comfortable than awkward.

A quarter of a bottle of juice emptied, and there was only the comfortableness of touch and laughter and familiarity left between them. Half a bottle downed had the twins feeling especially giddy and daring.

Their heads were resting in Haruhi's lap, their limbs strewn all over her like a body hazard.

"Let's play a game," They chirped up at her, "The share-a-secret-game." 

Haruhi didn't even bat an eye at them.

Skin brushed skin, touches were enforced casually, limbs covered limbs. "It can't be anything you shared with anyone else, though." The twin's voices contained all the enthusiasm of a child talking about his favorite toy. "It has to be a secret secret." 

There was a rolling of eyes, a sigh, a collective sip of juice.

"We can start off," Hikaru amended, gulped the contents of his glass down, as Kaoru pulled on his more contemplative features. "When we were children, really little…" 

"…like really, really little…" Hikaru continued, entwined hand with hand with hand. "We wished…" 

There was this smallest beat of pause in mid-talk, in which the twins shared a look out of the corners of their eyes and an understanding.

"We wished," they repeated in unison, their one voice strong and unwavering, their limbs a united front around Haruhi. There was another pause, of a different nature than the first.

Someone trembled. Another shared look. Then, their voices chorused in complete synch, "We wished we had been born an only child." 

Haruhi mhm'ed. She didn't protest when they pulled her so tightly against them it looked as if their three bodies had been molded into one.

"Do you want another glass of juice?" she asked instead, refilled their glasses before they answered.

They all took a sip and then Haruhi whispered into someone's ear and someone else's arms, "I didn't always want to be a lawyer." 

The ear twitched, the arm tightened. Hikaru was about to mutter something for which he earned himself a look from Kaoru.

"So," Hikaru grumbled in place of whatever he had been about to say, "And what did you want to be?" 

Haruhi's face acquired a new edge, firm, hard, plain. She shrugged nonchalantly. "I don't remember." 

Finger explored the lines of Haruhi's face until they discovered a hint of softness.

"Why did you decide to become a lawyer?" Kaoru asked.

Haruhi shrugged again, just as nonchalantly. "At some point, nothing else seemed appropriate anymore." 

The twins made a vague noncommittal sound in the back of their throat. They didn't protest when Haruhi seemed to declare the game finished.

Instead, they asked her to refill their glasses.

The remaining contents of a bottle later, Hikaru reclaimed his own limbs from their tangle, stood up and declared he would fetch them a new bottle of juice from the buffet in the ballroom downstairs.

Haruhi watched Kaoru watch Hikaru vanishing behind the doors, down the stairs.

"We'll wait for him before starting on the food," she remarked, frank as ever, gestured at the picnic basket.

Kaoru appeared startled there, for barely a moment, before a small smile crept unto his lips.

"It's weird when you do that," he let her know. She lifted cranberry-juice coloured lips, looked at him shrewdly with big, brown eyes. "You two do it all the time." 

(It was that moment both realized they were on the roof together, alone. Strangely enough, aside from a blush from Hikaru and Haruhi's blank expression, it didn't change a thing.)

Simply as that, he felt all distance that may have remained between them drain way. He exhaled two breaths.

Plain, she looked there in the dark, plain and covered in seriousness and not even all that pretty.

Kaoru exhaled one more weak breath, the sound of a man drowning.

It didn't matter, he figured and with the third breath, he sunk into her, around her skinny frame, his muscles going lax as he molded himself around her. He breathed her in like his last breath, like a shot of oxygen and she let him.

Cranberry juice breaths mixed, arms entangled waist, forehead pressed against forehead.

The tips of their noses sporadically touching, all of him full of closeness, warmth and Haruhi, Kaoru decided to share a secret secret with Haruhi.

"I never did," he murmured, "Wish that I were an only child, that is." 

She turned those big, brown eyes on him.

"A teacher. An architect. A doctor," she said, snorted, a very Hikaru-esk sound. "A ballerina." 

Despite himself, Kaoru snickered. "A ballerina? You wanted to become a ballerina? Hikaru would love this." 

She deadpanned. "I'm sure he'd." (Both knew the other wouldn't mention anything to anyone, not even to Hikaru.)

They were like this a bit longer, relaxed, comfortable, at ease with the world in general and with each other in particular.

Surprisingly, Haruhi was the first to speak up, brown eyes turning on him again, a look of outmost concentration on her face. "You never told Hikaru this," she stated. It was a fact, no discussion, and they both knew it. "That doesn't seem very fair." 

A rumble or a tremble went through Kaoru at that. "For Hikaru and me it never was about fair or unfair." 

Haruhi didn't go completely still against him, but there was a tangible pause in her breathing.

"Oh," she said, "Oh," and nothing more.

"Haruhi?" Kaoru whispered into her silence in an unsteady rasp, because he didn't want to, had to know, "Do you like one of us better?" 

It was one of those rare occasions Haruhi initiated touch.

She fit her head under his chin, her arms around his waist. "No," she stated, a fact as well, no compromise.

"Good," Kaoru said and entwined their hands.

They were silent, together, alone, after that.

Kaoru huddled against her, for warmth, for touch. She squeezed his hands, ever so often.

Both were waiting for Hikaru to come back.

When he did come, it was in a slamming of door and a stomping of feet.

"Man, you better appreciate this. I had to knock out a waiter and escape a horde of squeal-ready fangirls to get this bottle." 

He dropped down next to them, spoils of war (in this case cranberry juice) in hands.

Haruhi took an unblinking look from him to the bottle. Afterwards, she dodged out of Kaoru's arms, stood up and started to wander a few feet away from them.

(They let her.)

Hikaru frowned. "Yeah, thanks, Hikaru, that you went through all that trouble," he grumbled,

"What's with her anyway?" 

"I believe she's thinking," Kaoru replied. He considered his twin before him. "Was it really so difficult to get a bottle of juice, you got abrasions on your hands?" 

"I don't have-" 

Kaoru took one of his twin's hands, squeezed.

Hikaru squeaked. "Okay, yeah, abrasions." He crossed his arms before his chest, lifted his chin.

"I did some of that emotional maturing business. You're not the only one who can set up a date. We're even for Karuizawa now." He flexed his hands, winced. "Doesn't mean I've to like this maturing thing." 

"Now you know what I had to deal with for all those years," Kaoru replied wryly. His eyes, though, remained on the wounds, not once looking away. "I think I prefer you throwing temper tantrums to you hitting walls." 

Hikaru shrugged indifferently. His eyes, though, remained downcast, not once looking up. "The wall deserved it." 

"Deserved what?" a soft voice piped up closer to them than they had assumed Haruhi to be.

They startled. The innocent looks they plastered instantly on their faces managed to make them look positively guilty.

Haruhi rolled her eyes at them. "Forget it." 

She came to a halt immediately before them. Shifted in her dress, irrationally wished for a pair of practical trousers.

The twins never received any warning.

Haruhi simply donned seriousness, determination and something new and wielded words at them with all the delicacy of a spiked mace.

"I'm done thinking." 

The twins were caught flat-footed by the attack.

Hikaru fidgeted, Kaoru shivered, stuttered, tried to talk through clenched teeth. "It's okay, you, um, we understand-" 

Haruhi went blank-faced, blinked. "Idiots," she told them, softly, breathy, like a confession.

Next, it was all about feeling and trying to keep in mind which body parts were actually yours.

Hikaru clung at her, to her. "That was a yes, wasn't it? About what we're," he rasped, claimed anything of her he could reach.

"Say it again," he demanded.

Haruhi turned to them then, a strong willed eighteen years old encased in unfamiliar clothes and familiar touches, her eyes full of something as she told them:

"I depend on you more than on anyone else." 

Underneath a starless night sky, amidst all the entangling and sighing that followed, Kaoru could remember thinking that Haruhi had the strangest way to say she was in love.


End file.
